The annual London Word Festival recently took London by storm. It began on March 7th of this year and ran until the 1st of April. The London Word Festival is exactly what it sounds like: a citywide celebration of the keystone of language, both spoken and written – the word. The event was founded by Tom Chivers, Sam Hawkins and Marie McPartlin in 2007, and is based in London’s vibrant East End. In the short time since its establishment, the festival has earned a strong reputation by featuring a wide range of artists from the fields of music, literature, comedy, theatre and live art. In 2009 the festival received a “Breakthrough Award” from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, an independent organization that awards grants for the improvement of art, education, and social justice.
Of course, the literary festival itself is not a novel idea. There are more than 60 listed at the British Council website, and over 100 listed at LiteraryFestivals.co.uk. But the London Word festival doesn’t call itself a literature, books, or even readers’ event. Instead, it aims to be a celebration of words and a test of their limits “in performance.”
At the Word Festival’s launch party in Shoreditch, guests were fed plates of word-shaped biscuits, encouraged to Adopt a Word by the charity campaign of the same name, and could even get their favorite (perhaps more appropriately – ‘favourite’) word cooked up at the “while-U-wait” Chip Shop installation – and by cooked up, I mean printed. The Chip Shop is a fully functioning temporary screen-printing workshop, serving up words printed on a wooden board. London’s Henningham Family Press conceived and manages The Chip Shop, which they built to replicate a full-size chippy (Londonese for a fast food café – as in fish and chips). Inside the life-sized replica, visitors may order a word of their choice from the menu. Then, a printer will screen-print the word onto a piece of chipboard before wrapping it in newspaper for you to take away – all for the price of a real bag of chips.
Other events in the festival included music, storytelling, poetry, and theater (or, should I say ‘theatre’?) – all of them celebrating words in one way or another. There were even Scrabble Sunday events at the Pembury Tavern, which is, according to the Word Festival’s website, “an afternoon of laid-back word-battle in East London’s best boardgaming pub.”
This annual celebration is not the only place where words are celebrated. The most obvious place in which to find evidence of this fanaticism would be your local library or bookstore, where you may find a section devoted to the English language itself. While there are hundreds of books about writing, what about books about words? In 2007, writer and word-lover Ammon Shea spent a year reading and studying the Oxford English Dictionary. He documented his experience reading all 59 million words from the 20 volumes and published the account of his experience as a memoir, titled Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages. He included in his list of 26 favorite words from the OED, published on the Los Angeles Times website, the word ‘vocabularian,’ meaning one who pays too much attention to words.
Even more abundant than books about words are the myriad websites dedicated to them. There are too many corners of the web devoted to vocabularians for one person to read in a lifetime. Canadian author Paul Mcfedries runs and owns Wordspy.com, a website that tracks new words and phrases as they enter the language. Wordspy, one of the more remarkable word sites, not only defines the words in its database, but displays actual citations of the words – most of which were invented as media slang – as used in their original context and with notes of each word’s origin. Another word-centric website is myfavoriteword.com, where the content is submitted by readers who include a short explanation of the significance behind the word they chose to share.
So what is it about the word that is so important to so many people? Is it simply a fad – a passing trend of half-interest used as a gimmick and an excuse to live it up for a few weeks in London? Perhaps, but I think there is more to it than that. In any widely written or spoken modern language, the words are the lowest common denomination with which to express meaning. All other aspects of communication – from aural inflection to body language – are only supplementary to the words we speak. If to write is to construct a building, words are the bricks; they are essential to the structure, but they cannot meaningfully stand on their own. It is the sentence – the precise and intentional composition of the words – that acts as the frame and foundation. Just as the most basic of tools in a painter’s arsenal is the color, the artist must use these colors in an intentional and expressive way to create a meaningful painting to be understood by viewers – and by meaningful, I’m referring to a picture as a depiction of people or places or objects (in other words, not Color Field paintings). So, if the last time you really appreciated a word was when you knew its meaning on the SATs, maybe it is time you join a word-of-the-day email service. And if you want to express yourself in a richer, fuller way, open a dictionary and add a few new colors to your palette.
Michael Filippone is a senior at Drexel University. He is studying Music Industry.
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genuinely good. I wanted pictures to add in my school project perfectly as the images you could have posted are sincere. Thanks for them buddy! I guess teacher will love my project mainly because these images and of course the details I provided.