Words fascinate and inspire me. I would even consider them friends. This episode explores my 60+ year long relationship with words as well as the questions and answers in which I have found them.
Now That You Ask is a podcast that looks at topics that range from death to desire, and from wondrous to downright whacky. Join host, Akasha Halsey as she takes listeners on a journey through her writing and experience with life’s most persistent questions.
Thank you for listening!
Listen to more episodes like this and subscribe to updates at https://nowthatyouaskpodcast.com/
I hadn’t heard of the Proust Questionnaire despite having interviewed hundreds of people as a corporate consultant and a mental health counselor. Interesting idea.
Harry Stack Sullivan was a well-known psychiatrist with an interview method named after himself. It really works to get someone talking which is more than half the battle in an interview.
“Proust” is usually pronounced proost rather than prowst, although I haven’t spent enough time in the South to understand all the wicked directions of French in Dixie.
Of course any literary person or anthropologist would put words at the top of their list of revelatory curiousities. An article by Tim Parks in this weeks’ (or last weeks’) London Review offers a window into the ultimate obscurities and idiosyncrasies of words (and languages). For instance how did Italians speak to one another through all those centuries of Rome and Renaissance before the 19th Century when Italy became Italy and Italian became a modern kingdom’s language? For the longest time every province of Italy spoke in its own tongue; Latin and Greek were the languages of the educated. Etc. Parks would say that communication was powerfully limited because speakers from different provinces could only talk to one another in generic or approximate ways.
This brings up the topic of the impoverishment of languages because modern media have become such censors of local words and meanings.