us that language serves as an emblem of the phenomenon (a figure of speech) and
the latter identifying the imaginative process that has married concept to phenom-
enon to produce the image. A word, therefore, is a marriage of mind and matter,
of concept and phenomenon, that conveys a specific human perception of Nature.
Language by extension contains in itself a culture's ideological definitions of what
is real, reminding us that the word real means "royal" in Spanish, thus giving au-
thority to that particular perception.

Words themselves can offer complex stories. When a word is formed by
internal connections, we are moving into idiomatic language rather than language
rooted in the organic principle defined by Lavoisier. We can connect the word
letter, for instance, with each discrete part of the alphabet that can be sensually
apprehended. On the other hand, the word alphabet is a compilation of the names
given to the first two letters of the Greek alphabet. Even in its original meaning,
therefore, this word depends upon the preexisting concept of letter and the social
context of Greek words for at least two different letters. While letter is a literal
image, alphabet is already idiomatic.

Both idiomatic and idiot share the Greek root idios, which means "one's own"
or "private," revealing that even at the level of individual words a language can
become idiotically exclusive, understood fully only by members of its own group
and/or in the context of its cultural moment. Although they draw on idiomatic
language to capture the voice of a certain time and place, literary artists must
depend primarily upon the root meaning of words as the raw material for an art
that seeks to express universal meanings linguistically. When our language be-
comes too exclusive, it obscures its connection with the organic principle it was
created to convey, the meronymic marriage of phenomenon and concept.

From the Greek root word mero-, or part, a meronym is an image composed
of discrete parts that simultaneously constitute an independent image. Gray, for
instance, is composed of both black and white, yet it is distinguishable from ei-
ther black or white. Meronymic, therefore, implies at least three acknowledged
parts interpenetrating and coexisting, while the word itself identifies only the
third, apparently single, image. This recognition of the contributing parts as well
as the variations of the current image allows the meronym to be simultaneously
individual and diverse. Gray is a simple expression of a complex concept: it
acknowledges its dependence on the independently existing colors of black and
white, while in itself it includes so many possibilities that a recent Hewlett
Packard advertisement for a computer scanner can promise to detect "256 shades
of gray." Everything coexists independently in this "community" of black and
white and the myriad shades between which share the word gray; so too any
meronym expands our perception of reality because it encompasses simultaneous
realities even when only one concrete image, such as charcoal or platinum, is
apparent.

On the other hand, the Greek root met- means change, and the metonym and
metaphor imply that one thing changes into, or is subsumed in, another thing. A
metonym such as the Crown, for instance, subsumes the human being who at any

-xii-