Sometimes we have to be forcibly reminded of that starting point for all that we do in our profession, audience, audience, audience. Such has been my experience recently. More than once in the last few months I have been asked, in a variety of ways, the question, “Why (or how) did you start writing your column?” That directed me to what should have been an obvious conclusion—not all of you current readers were reading Between the Lines when the first number of this column was published (this is #26 in the series). Therefore, I thought it appropriate to review for the veterans, and explain for more recent visitors, the origins and purposes of “Calling All Verbivores” (CAV).

Let me begin by quoting myself, from #1:

Yes, I am a self-confessed verbivore. As an avid reader for many years; a (at times) reluctant writer who found himself in a third career of technical writing, editing, and instructional design; and a speaker of the English language (sometimes from the stage); I have been involved with words for longer than most of you have been alive. Somewhere along the way I found that I was fascinated by such things as word puzzles, amusing misuses of words, and the peculiarities of the English language. When I encountered Lederer’s term “verbivore,” the light dawned. I am one.

For example, on one project I was working in an environment that required me to be escorted by someone with security clearance until my clearance came through. That meant that it was often more convenient for me to eat my lunch at my desk than to find an escort to the cafeteria or the room designated for the congregation of brown-baggers. On such occasions I sometimes doodled as I ate.One of the doodling activities was an exercise in finding or making two-word nominalizations with identical endings for the two words. I used some of those results in the puzzle I posed to readers of that first number of CAV. I challenged them to supply two-word nominalizations that serve as equivalents for a list of phrases. The example given in illustration was the phrase “trigger for Narcissus’s fate,” the solution of which is “reflection inspection.” It was during such lunchtime activity that the idea for a column on words and the English language came to me.

At the beginning of one program year of SWO STC I asked the new editor of Between the Lines, Maggie Prince, if she would be interested in receiving and publishing such a column. She was, and she did, and that was the start of this enterprise. Editors who followed Maggie have continued to publish “Calling All Verbivores.” It has been fun for me to produce the column, and I have been gratified by the responses from SWO STC members who have told me that they enjoy the column. A couple (whose names are withheld to protect the weak and innocent) have even said that CAV is the first thing they read in Between the Lines.

Since launching CAV, I have expressed my fascination with words in another project that is much more polemic in nature. I have been examining the continuing relevance of words in a period of our professional history that I call the Eliza Doolittle period, from a line that Eliza sings in My Fair Lady (Lerner and Lowe):
“Words, words, words, I’m so sick of words. I hear words all day through, first from him now from you. Is that all you blighters can do?” The emphasis on the importance of graphic communication has sometimes seemed to put us in the stance of denigrating the importance of words and making too sharp a distinction between decoding words and decoding graphic images. The title I have given this project is “A Curmudgeonly Critique of the Cult of Visual Literacy.” So far I have not found an audience that wants to hear it.

Incidentally, Eliza’s line, quoted above, is from Alan Jay Lerner, not from George Bernard Shaw, author of the play Pygmalion, which is the basis of the musical, My Fair Lady. Both because of my preoccupation with words and because I have very recently completed a run playing Colonel Pickering in Pygmalion, I am reminded of an anecdote about Shaw. It is told of an encounter between Shaw and a lady who said to him, “Mr. Shaw, your play is nothing but words, words, words.” Shaw’s reply was, “Madam, that is like saying the sea is nothing but water, water, water.”

To bring this confession/explanation exercise to a close I will quote myself again, from #12:

"Words fascinate me. They always have. For me, browsing in a dictionary is like being turned loose in a bank." (Eddie Cantor, quoted on http://www.wolinskyweb.com/word.htm)

If those words describe you, you are a verbivore, and these columns are for your enjoyment.