Voices de la Luna:
A Quarterly Poetry & Arts Magazine
5150 Broadway #149
San Antonio, Texas 78209
The Back Page
Brief Bios of Selected Contributors
Vickie Vértiz
Vickie Vértiz’s writing has been featured in Huizache, Bozalta, and The
Coiled Serpent anthology from Tia Chucha Press. Her poetry collection
was a 2016 Andrés Montoya Book Prize finalist. A new Macondo Fellow,
Vickie’s poems were chosen by Natalie Diaz for the 2016 University of
Arizona Poetry Center Summer Residency.
Taylor Collier
Taylor Collier is currently finishing a PhD at Florida State University.
He holds graduate degrees from Syracuse University and the University
of North Texas. Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in publications
such as Barrow Street, The Laurel Review, Rattle, Smartish Pace, Zone
3, and others. More poems and poetry are at taylorcollier.com.
Paul Juhasz
Born and raised in New Haven, Connecticut, Paul Juhasz has presented
dozens of academic papers at a wide range of national and regional conferences and has had two academic papers published. After a fifteen-year career teaching composition and literature at institutions in Texas and Pennsylvania, he decided to try to turn a hobby into something more. Leaving
academia, Paul worked at an Amazon fulfillment center with the intention
of turning his experiences there into a nonfiction exposé. His works of
creative nonfiction and humor have been presented at the College English
Association, Southwest Pop Culture Association, and at The Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas. He is currently riding a truck for 1-800-GOTJUNK, gathering material for his next project.
K.B. Eckhardt
K.B. Eckhardt authored the chapbook We Were Here, and her poems
have appeared in MARGIE/The American Journal of Poetry and The
Weight of Addition, an anthology of Texas poetry (Mutabilis Press). Eckhardt, formerly of Houston, now resides in San Antonio. She has taught
at Sam Houston and Angelo State universities and has recorded novels
for Turning Sight Into Sound Radio. Eckhardt’s Chinese ink paintings
have been exhibited at the MD Anderson Cancer Center and The Jung
Center.
Frontispiece to the 1831 Edition of Frankenstein
44
Voices de la Luna, 15 November 2016
Idioma
Sometimes Words Have No Meaning
James R. Adair
I’ve always had a hard time understanding music lyrics. When
I was growing up, one of my favorite songs was Led Zeppelin’s
“Stairway to Heaven.” About halfway through the song are these
words:
There’s a sign on the wall
But she wants to be sure
‘Cause you know sometimes words have two meanings.
I know that now, because I heard a live version of the song that
was more understandable (to me), and of course I also looked
up the lyrics on the web. Growing up, I thought the words were:
There’s a sign on the wall
But she wants to be sure
‘Cause you know sometimes words have no meaning.
While it’s true that words are often ambiguous (the Greek prefix ambi means both), it’s also true that they sometimes have no
semantic content at all: no meaning. Such words are sometimes
called “filler words” or “filled pauses.” They are things people
may say when they have nothing to say at the moment but don’t
want to project “dead air” or relinquish their currently active role
as speaker to another, or they may just use these words and phrases as expressed verbal commas. Examples are words like uh, like,
you know, and well. We all say them from time to time. President
Reagan’s favorite way to start an answer to a question was, “Well
… .” A word more common with the younger set, though hardly
missing from the usage of older people, is like. “Like, I really really like John, you know, like for real.” This sentence uses eleven
words when three will do: “I like John.”
I don’t think it’s my imagination, but one particular filler word
seems to be on the rise, especially among educated people. I
was listening to—nerd alert!—“Science Friday” on NPR a few
weeks ago. This program features Ira Flatow interviewing various scientists who are guests on his show. While listening to the
show, I was struck by how often the scientists—almost always
PhDs in their fields of study, and Flatow regularly refers to them
as Dr. So-and-so—began their responses to Flatow’s questions
with the word so. Flatow: “How does your discovery impact our
understanding of the gut genome?” Really smart guest scientist:
“So, … .” And it’s not just scientists who say it. CNN anchor:
“So, what do you have to report from Afghanistan?” CNN correspondent in the field: “So, this morning … .”
Even though I’m now aware of it and try to avoid saying it,
the ubiquity of contentless so can so overwhelm a person that it
invades his vocabulary without his permission, so that he finds
himself using so not as a coordinating conjunction, nor as a subordinating conjunction, nor as an adverbial intensifier, but as a
simple, insipid filler word, so he says it without really thinking
about it. So, I guess, well, you know, it’s true that, like, sometimes words have no meaning.