Sunday, June 29, 2025

Playing With Words, Vladimir Nabokov

 


The Underside of Words

“I like to take a word and turn it over to see its underside, shiny or dull or adorned with motley hues absent on its upperside . . . one finds all sorts of curious things by studying the underside of a word—unexpected shadows of other words, harmonies between them, hidden beauties that suddenly reveal something beyond the word.”

When given a demonstration of “serious word play, the good reader suddenly sees a completely new facet of an iridescent sentence.”

Vladimir Nabokov, Think, Write, Speak

[excerpted from book by U.R. Bowie, Here We Be. Where Be We?]



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