My wife is a member of an artists' cooperative, an organization of artists working in several arts like painting, pottery and photography. They are an active and energetic group. But I notice that there are basically no word workers. They do sell some greeting cards but the language arts seem to have been skipped somewhat.
The question can arise: what is an art? I think we can speak meaningfully of the art of snow removal and I know the art of cooking is a big deal, a giant deal. However, I think the art of speaking, and by extension, the art of deciding what words to put on paper or monitor screen is a very widely used art. Little kids are polishing up their statements for parents and elders to convey Christmas gift desires. Men are deciding what to say in a proposal of marriage.
Yesterday, I read a statement by Miriam Nestle, a food scientist, mentioning the book "Nose Dive", a book about our noses and sense of smell. While looking in various places for a copy of that book to look at, I saw "The Ape Who Spoke: Language and the Evolution of the Human Mind" by John McCrone (1991). Whether we are speaking or writing, we are engaging in an art, using our knowledge of a language and our feelings of who and what we are, what we are feeling emotionally, what we are trying to convey. We do in fact have many words for our language productions, such as statement, testimony, poem, essay, letter and such.
A big portion of education, on just about all levels, involves the production and reception of language. You might speak some words that educate me and I might write some that convince you I have learned. We produce words so often during the day, it is easy to overlook how much our lives are made of words.
