Sin and Syntax by Constance Hale

Author:Constance Hale [Hale, Constance]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-34693-1
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2013-08-12T16:00:00+00:00

Flesh

But some philologists—those, like this writer, who simply love words of all kinds—take this part of speech seriously. And for writers there is much to appreciate in sentence jetsam.

Here’s what William Mathews, in Words: Their Use and Abuse, had to say back in 1876 about the interjection: “These little words, so expressive of joy, of hope, of doubt, of fear, which leap from the heart like fiery jets from volcanic isles,—these surviving particles of the ante-Babel tongues, which spring with the flush or blanching of the face to all lips, and are understood by all men,—these ‘silver fragments of a broken voice’ … are emphatically and preëminently language.”

Interjections sit perhaps most naturally in writing such as Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky—because they carry about as much weight as their nonsense neighbors:

One, two! One, two! And through and through

The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!

He left it dead, and with its head

He went galumphing back.

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