I’ve often wondered if it’s accidental that fact and fiction share consonants. Oh, the vowels are completely different, and fiction ends with that trickster consonant n, but don’t let that fool you. Things aren’t always as clear cut as they say. In some languages, I’ve been told, the meaning of a word lies in its root. My friend Steve once told me that Hebrew words have “triliteral roots.” That is, words based on the same three consonants, in that order, are closely related. You can make a noun into a verb by taking the root and changing the vowels. Maybe something similar is going on with fact and fiction. Jorge Luis Borges, I have to confess, hasn’t appeared in my reading as much as he should. Many of his story revolve around the indeterminacy of words. They change, they shift, they mean something we didn’t mean for them to mean. And he sometimes uses Hebrew as an example. I don’t read Hebrew—English is difficult enoug...
Blog of a struggling writer.