The Word, Speech
The word speech comes from the Anglo Saxon specan, meaning to speak, or from sprecan, meaning speak.
Common meaning: discourse; an adress; a talk; an oration. To speak refers to the verbal meaning. To speak means to talk, to say or to tell; to spread, disseminate, set forth or make known; to disperse, dispense, unfold, or to divulge; to orate, to distribute, to circulate, or to extend reason, science or saying. To speak means to express thoughts.
The word oration is from the Latin orare or from the Old French oratour, meaning to speak or to pray. An oration may be called a sermon, an oracle or vision verbally set forth.
The Latin loqui (loquor, locutus) means to speak. These forms are found in the words eloquent, elocution and soliloquy. The forms loquor, loqui, locutus, mean I speak or I talk. They are embodied in the words, loquacity, colloquy and ventriloquist.
The Greek Logos means word, speech, reason, ratio, science, description, saying, thing and logical matters or things.
The following table will classify and define speech:
Realm IDIVINITY. The Word; The Logos; The Speech and The Speaker of The Word.
Realm II
SPIRITUALITY: the logician—wisdom—who has the power of speech or expression; who has full ratio of understanding and reason; the whole unit—man, the thinker—who is the whole idea, integer and entity ever iterating, repeating, reiterating and re-presenting The Logos Speech.
Realm III
MORALITY: the speaker and speech of moral science, highest human ethics, excellence or conscience, who dictates, says, and reiterates his wisdom in all languages, in moral sentiments and in conscientious doctrines.
Here honesty has the power of speech, faith orates or prays to realize her hope, compassion distributes, spreads or dispenses her charity and her affection.Realm IV
PHYSICALITY: The Greek glossa or glotta refers to the physical tongue, the native speech or the human nature, or the human mammal and its language or tongue. This physical tongue is the organ of speech. It pertains to the utterance of sound, or to distinct articulation.
Realm V
IMMORALITY: the speaker in this realm is lewdness, moral ignorance, licentiousness, and vileness. Here vice and the viciousness of deceit tongues, mouths or talks as symbol of the serpent's tongue; talks as deluded babbler and mutterer.
The foregoing table shows that the word speech loses its reason or its highly rational substance when it is reduced to lower (than conscience) meanings. It loses its reality and its authority when it is demoted below the speech of conscience or Realm III. It becomes humanized or finitized. It becomes the serpentine tongue of human knowledge and confusion; the babbling murmurings or the morally irrational complaints; the heinous tongue of personal opinion induced from morally perverted premises.
In Realm II (reality) speech is the thinker's soul expressing itself. It is the spirit or divine erg of the logician or speaker making a motion, moving, proposing or presenting his idea or putting it in spoken words. It is the voice of verity and reality urging wisdom; uttering intelligence.
Speech and speaker are presumed to be male, while hearer, audience, or understander and conceiver are presumed to be female in their function.
In Realm I The Speaker is The Logos speaking to The divine creative conceiver—The audient One, sometimes known as The Holy Ghost (the silent, invisible One). She is The Word—with God—in the beginning or creative action or administration.
In Realm II the speaker is wisdom witnessing, exerting his power of speech, or breathing forth words of wisdom. He is the true logician, the wholly (holy) correct and accurate thinker setting forth, putting forth or exercising his speaking or expressive faculties. He is mon—the truth thinker—breathing out that which he has put into true or wise or scientific words. He is mon—the male element of spirituality—speaking, instructing, expressing or specifying for the purpose of being immaculately heard, intuitively understood, and vividly or vigorously conceived of; for the purpose of having his potential ideas made actual by the female element of mon—the truth thinker. This is the wholly (holy) legitimate speaker.
It is the male element in every realm which sets forth, and it is the female which brings forth, effects, reveals, completes, accomplishes, executes, finishes, performs, forms, gives true and tangible form (readable form or record). It is she who carries out, carries, bears, sustains and nurtures his potentially effective perceptions, or his truly wise undertakings. Thus this male and female function to counteract the lie or the lying talker, the audible and silent denier, the mythological and hypocritical charmer or charming personality. They function to nullify the anti-moral influence, the magnetic allurer (self-idolater or self-manipulatory speech) exciting its own imagery and impressing its own fascinated conceivers.
[ see also ]
two more selections from The Word: a Philosophy of Words
[ from Fascicle 1 ]
back to Imagining Language supplement
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