Gotta Write

In the 1952 movie “Singin in the Rain” Gene Kelly has a dance number called “Gotta Dance” that was an apt description of his career. I’ve heard it said that successful writers are those who must write (who cannot NOT write, if you want the emphasis of the double negative). But there is writing and there is writing.

Ernest Hemingway wrote “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and bleed.”

Maya Angelou wrote “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

Anais Nin wrote “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”

Larry Hostetler wrote the following (now I can say that once in my life my name was in the same list as Hemingway, Angelou, and Nin) because he suffers from graphomania and sometimes is dithyrambic as he tries to limn.

Graphomania, as the suffix –mania indicates, refers to a compulsion, and the grapho- prefix (it’s usually a suffix, too, like in photograph or phonograph) refers to writing. The first time the two were put together was in 1827, in the word graphomaniac, referring to the person with a passion or morbid desire to write. It was adjusted to graphomania in 1840. It came to English through French or German from Greek, where the words graphia means “description of” and graphien means “write or express in written characters.”

Dithyrambic is the adjective of dithyramb, which means the dictionary’s primary definition is “pertaining to the nature of a dithyramb”. Don’t you love it when a dictionary is so limning? A dithyramb is described as a choral hymn that is “passionate”, “of vehement or wild character”, or “exalted or enthusiastic”.  In other words, Norah Jones would never be called dithyrambic. It was eventually applied to writing other than just hymns.   It came to English in the 1600s from the Greek word dithyrambos, but where that came from is unknown. It was originally associated with hymns to Dionysus, the god of wine and ecstasy. No wonder its origin is unknown. It was probably coined by a drunk person in ecstasy trying to say another word.

Limn is the first of today’s words I came across.  It was originally used (in the 1500s) to describe the illustrations (illuminations they are called) in manuscripts. In Middle English the word used was luminen, the obvious true source of Eminem’s name (don’t believe all you read in the tabloids or on Wikipedia). The Middle English got it from the Old French word luminer which came from the Latin luminare, which meant to illuminate. From the artistic illuminations it is not a stretch to apply limn to written words that are damn illuminating.   (Mark Twain wrote “Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”