I write fancy.

Not by the courtly Augustans’ standard (Dr. Johnson, Gibbon, et al.), balancing their syntax as exactly as a jeweler weighs gold; not with the relentless refinements of the late Victorians (Pater, Henry James) who extended sentences, like taffy, to breathtaking lengths (literally, breathtaking); or with the pugnacious obscurity of certain modernists (Joyce, V. Woolf), whose audacity defied explication except by adepts; not even, alas, with the whimsical elegance of that incomparable Georgian, Jane Austen, whose sly prose mischievously winks; but with a choirboy’s reverence for rhetoric, meanings, music and nuance, and breezy indifference to sluggards who can’t or won’t keep pace. Whether my prose pleases or appalls, sings or shrieks, is not my call; for sure, it’s more taxing than the seventh-grade reading level recommended for bestsellers. I swear by my semi-colons, dashes, adjectives, and swear at published words that don’t invite exertion. Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, and Strunk and White overcleaned English prose, so it lost its patina. The Beats and Post-modernists too often flaunted their contempt of society by writing contemptuously of tradition (the equivalent of adolescents dying their hair green).

I’m overdoing my writing here to underscore my point: how we sound – as much as what we do, where (or whether) we pray, how we look – is who we are. We wear language, we don’t just don it. And whether our wardrobe choices are deliberate or inadvertent, they’re revelatory of our instant, attitude and outlook. The way we speak often says more than what we say.

This being true, what might my words’ manner say about their maker (for he is nothing if not a relentless self-scrutinizer!)? Is his finicky, sometimes altitudinous meticulousness snobbery, orneriness, defiance, panic, vanity, madcap or what?

A bit of each, I suspect. (“A physician who treats himself has a fool for a patient,” observed legendary Doctor Osler.)

I write this way, for starters, because you let me. All producers of gratuitous expression are showoffs more or less. I mean my verbal antics to amuse you; you like a surprising word now and then. I also mean my language to thresh my audience to a compatible sodality. If you don’t get the joke, I want you out of our temple, where we worship Thoth, Quetzalcoatl, Bao Zheng, Apollo, Ganesha, Odin, Minerva and the other literary deities. Pray with us, please, if you please, but do not prey on us.

I write this way in obstreperous defiance of the obnoxious illiteracy of our moment. Emojis, far from silver-tongued devils, are blunt as a fart. Certain of our countrymen’s gloating mockery of truth, knowledge, probity, and correct speech infuses me with fury and makes my skin crawl. The decline of the liberal arts and the academy’s substitution of polemics for piety makes me groan for our kind. Whether Shakespeare was feminist or misogynist, anarchist or monarchist seems beside the point. He was the sagest of souls and wiliest of makers – isn’t that enough?

I mean to write passionately about the matters I think matter, and respectfully of my forebears and readers. By romping with language, tousling it, hugging it, I’m hoping to portray my love. I also somewhat mystically believe that orderly words – and only they – can rescue us from the thuggish imbecility into which civilization is sliding. Of all the arts, only preserved words require us to consider, defend our assertions, coolly persuade. What we commit to writing recalls us incontrovertibly; it can be corrected, revised, but not gainsaid.

The words I most fancy play on the page, winking, capering, tickling, tugging me to think twice. I write fancy for fun, fancy that.