Back on the blog.

I am marking my overdue return to this blog with three short pieces from the course of today:

[HAIKU]

But here I am, with
Out any referent, and
Totally confused.

-A haiku drawn from today’s conversations with the marvelous HMR.

[QUESTION]

“The question is, how do we get issues of poverty into congregations –
into the pews, the pulpit, and the parish?” -AG and JC

[WORDPLAY]
I’ve decided to use a new term, verbivalence, referring to the power of words – as individual units and as a collective force. What’s nice about this word is the allusion to valence in chemical terms, which involves atoms joining together. Words and combinations of words can have higher and lower verbivalence. To illustrate, over dinner I meditated over a word with rather high verbivalence: break. Note the possibilities captured in these comparisons:

How does break differ among
breaking news,
breaking bread,
breaking ground,
breaking ice,
breaking one’s heart,
breaking a leg, and
breaking rank?

How does break differ among when a relationship
breaks off,
breaks down, and
breaks up?

What’s the difference of break between
someone breaking down and
breaking something down?

What’s the difference of break between
someone breaking out and
breaking something out?

What’s the difference of break between
someone breaking in and
breaking someone in?

What’s the difference of break among
breaking into a profession or field,
breaking into a sweat,
breaking into a song, and
breaking into a house?

What’s the difference of break between
breaking into something and
breaking out of something?

What’s the difference of break between
a break-out and
a break-through?

Now, having introduced the concept of verbivalence, it now remains to create an appropriate scale for assessing it.