words such as buzz or murmur that imitate

"Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact."
--Willa Cather
I wonder if any of us can remember when we learned to read. It's a memory I wish I held, but can't seem to bring it up in my mind fully.

Perhaps because it was more structured, I can remember learning the meaning of pieces of words--roots, prefixes, suffixes (Conjunction Junction on Saturday mornings, not withstanding)--and the power of the order of words. I remember learning how to curse. I do remember learning to write, I even remember learning how to write in "cursive style." In notebooks with rows of two solid lined pages with the dashed line in between. But I do not remember the moment I learned to read or to recognize words on a page. I wonder if anyone who learns to read at a young age can. I wonder if it is possible to remember what it was like before words had context or if that is something that disappears seconds after language is understood. All I know is, the moment letters put on a page came mean something to me is unknown.

I've been playing most of this evening with Thinkmap's Visual Thesaurus (clicking on the images will enlarge them for a better view of the text). It's not new, I've known about it for a while, and have played with it now and again, but, today, for some reason, maybe because my brain has been more frazzled than usual, I found myself in front of its tentacled connections for hours, fascinated with the word play.

I've often enjoyed toying with language and words. But I am especially fascinated by the language of thought and perception, their interwoven nature, and their visual associations. How lists of ideas and events, and even physical sensations may be associated with images and words; or sounds and words, or words and other words (ditto/Dorito as a friend has placed in my mind recently). I wonder why there are times words form visual associations other than the letters they use to form themselves. And what happens inside an individual's brain that makes these associations, it's not necessarily simply how something is read or misread, or misheard. I believe there is more to the fragmented narrative of our brains.

What I love, today especially, about Visual Thesaurus is how successful it is at pretending to achieve the randomness of human associations (or perhaps that is because they are not random after all?). It does not simply list synonyms and antonyms, its programmers were much more clever than that. It takes words and offers phrases that are not casually referenced and go beyond a computer's usual linear connections, mimicking the chaos of a human brain. And you can click on the associations endlessly, each time finding a changing relationship, between words, with new words and phrases; they shift, meanings altered, contexts lost, refusing conclusion.