The Hamlet Project

And now I would like to be an etymologist,
I slip back in time and dive head first into linguistics
As a young academic, toying with words, exploring them, following them through history, watching them expand and contract and shift their meanings, slipping off their significance like a robe
changing colors like chameleons
Or a mammal that has a white winter coat and exchanges it for brown in spring. I watch words like an evolutionary biologist watches Argentine Ants. I watch them fight, travel across continents, settle and colonize.
I spend years just pulling on the thread of “quote” hand over hand, following its path wheresoever it leads.