Welcome to the website woven for wordaholics, logolepts, and verbivores. Carnivores eat meat; herbivores eat plants and vegetables; verbivores devour words. If you are heels over head (as well as head over heels) in love with words, tarry here a while to graze or, perhaps, feast on the English language. Ours is the only language in which you drive in a parkway and park in a driveway and your nose can run and your feet can smell.

 

In a few days, our nation will celebrate the sesquicentennial of the Gettysburg Address, which Abraham Lincoln delivered on Nov. 19, 1863.

In Tuesday’s U-T, you’ll find my homage to that most memorable and memorized speech in the history of our nation. As a background to that momentous event, let us reflect upon the making of the literary Lincoln.

On Feb. 12, 1809, a boy was born in a log cabin in the backwoods of the American Middle West. He grew up with little formal schooling and never traveled except through a few rural counties. But Abraham Lincoln possessed a tenacious and overarching sense of purpose. When his friends taunted him that he was wasting his time “readin’ and learnin’,” the young man answered, “I will study and get ready, and some day my chance will come.”

There was little in the society about him to lift his eyes and ideals above the dry, unpromising soil, but in books he found wise counselors that shaped his aspirations before the world had yet heard of him. “The things I want to know are in books,” young Abraham told those who doubted him. “My best friend is the man who’ll git me a book I ain’t read.” Too poor to buy books, he borrowed them, once walking 40 miles to get one.

Cousins Dennis Hanks and John Hanks, who shucked corn and split rails with Lincoln from sunup to sundown, thought there was something “peculiarsome in Abe.” John Hanks, said, “When Abe and I came back to the house from work, he used to go to the cupboard, snatch a piece of corn bread, sit down, take a book, stick his legs up as high as his head and read in front of a fireplace till midnight.”

As a young man, Abraham Lincoln steeped himself in the rhetoric of the classical authors, the wisdom of Aesop, the music of the King James Bible and the expansive humanity of William Shakespeare, John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe and Robert Burns.

By the time he became president he had forged a distinguished prose style of his own — simple, clear, precise, forceful, rhythmic, poetic and, at times, majestic. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson all possessed surpassing verbal skills, but at his best, Lincoln towered above them all. The critic Jacques Barzun called him a “literary genius.”

Even while a sundered nation was slaughtering itself on the battlefields of the Civil War, Lincoln could still find time, on Nov. 21, 1864, to write this letter to Lydia Bixby.

Hear how Lincoln’s message gains dignity through the simplicity of its word choice and the rolling thunder of its cadence:

“Dear Madam: I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant-General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom. Yours very sincerely and respectfully, A. Lincoln”

Please send your questions and comments about language to richard.lederer@utsandiego.com