Page 391 - The Story of My Lif

intention, the desire to utter something, but the idea does not often become

specific, does not take shape until it is phrased; certainly an idea is a different
thing by virtue of being phrased. Words often make the thought, and the master
of words will say things greater than are in him.

A remarkable example is a paragraph from Miss Keller’s sketch in the Youth’s
Companion. Writing of the moment when she learned that everything has a
name, she says: “We met the nurse carrying my little cousin; and teacher spelled
‘baby.’ AND FOR THE FIRST

TIME I was impressed with the smallness and helplessness of a little baby, and
mingled with the thought there was another one of myself, and I was glad I was
myself, and not a baby.” It was a word that created these thoughts in her mind.
So the master of words is master of thoughts which the words create, and says
things greater than he could otherwise know. Helen Keller writing “The Frost
King” was building better than she knew and saying more than she meant.

Whoever makes a sentence of words utters not his wisdom, but the wisdom of
the race whose life is in the words, though they have never been so grouped
before. The man who can write stories thinks of stories to write. The medium
calls forth the thing it conveys, and the greater the medium the deeper the
thoughts.

The educated man is the man whose expression is educated. The substance of
thought is language, and language is the one thing to teach the deaf child and
every other child. Let him get language and he gets the very stuff that language
is made of, the thought and the experience of his race. The language must be one
used by a nation, not an artificial thing. Volapuk is a paradox, unless one has
French or English or German or some other language that has grown up in a
nation. The deaf child who has only the sign language of De l’Epee is an
intellectual Philip Nolan, an alien from all races, and his thoughts are not the
thoughts of an Englishman, or a Frenchman, or a Spaniard. The Lord’s prayer in
signs is not the Lord’s prayer in English.