A pwoermd a day

                                                           caugth (posted June 25, 2010)

An artful way to escape consonantal hardness is to sing a word's silent 'h', which renders the speech apparatus quite literally 'caught' (like a moral dilemma) somewhere between reality and a softening intention. A transposition of two final letters, and a kind of release ensues at the same time. As if the poet has reached the limits of programmable language, wanting to create where there's only a page of stony obdurateness in front of him. 'Caught' is simply too hard to face without amelioration (somehow). Perhaps the squeamish, by introducing speech's always silent 'h' partner & making life's tough endings more bearable, have one over the hard-nosed, for once. But what's the intention, really? Is intentionality the issue at all? And does the substitution of an 'h' not violate any sense of respectable meaning-making? At what point is it right to mess with the hard facts of the real world that evolve linguistically by millennia of usage only? It's, to me, quite akin to the elder's resentment of the propensity of the young to revel in permissible grey areas, forgetting that the young like to stand you on your head for fun. Lustful Mennonites before the beard!

As if the old dictum that language can only mean what's empirically given extends also to what's also potentially or gratuitously permissible. Anything given to speech this freely can't be all that bad, Huth seems to say. It's also interesting to ask what creative fiat led him to do it anyways: what phantom eidolon guides his hand. A Bronze Age versifier, who easily dispensed with a linguist-moralist's tricks,was perhaps the last to experience the thrill of 'h' seduction. But then the survival of the species depended on it. The artist's disdain for convolution.

Used in a sentence: Caugth is a safer bet than a Kantian 'ought'.