'The Deference We Pay to Harsh Choice'

“It’s not a showy word but a worker word, a syntactic functionary; and yet, for all its organizational aplomb, it secretly delights in nuance and ambiguity.” The poet and Islamic scholar Eric Ormsby is a voluptuary of language. He revels in words like a kid does ice cream. Ormsby took part in a parlor game, “One Word,” sponsored by the Poetry Society of America. Simple: pick a favorite word. In his poetry and essays, Ormsby’s vocabulary is often lush. In his review of Recollected Poems, he celebrates the Canadian poet Daryl Hine’s assault on linguistic anemia: “Others will balk at his sometimes extravagant vocabulary; words such as ‘amphisbaenic’ or ‘labarum’ or ‘ithyphallic’ will send them ‘scurrying’ to their dictionaries (why do they always ‘scurry’ or even ‘scuttle’? A new word, rightly used, should be an occasion for festive processions).” And yet Ormsby celebrates a humbler favorite word, one that every English-speaker knows: or. “[It] stands like a squat bouncer,” he writes,…