Frozen Words

Extract

Can words freeze as soon as uttered, and thus become inaudible? Polar research does not confirm it, and even the layman may well suspect that there are serious scientific objections to such a notion, and to its corollary, which is that congealed words should become audible on thawing. Yet this idea, through the ages, has given rise to a series of literary anecdotes and allusions, all of them humorous or satirical in intention. It is interesting to speculate how the idea arose in the first place. Hyperbole, including deliberately facetious hyperbole, is always present in the popular imagination, which tends to seek vivid, graphic, and sometimes wildly improbable comparisons in order to make its point. The heat of hell, and the coldness of charity, are equally undemonstrable from the strictly scientific point of view, while the goodness of gold must be regarded as ethically unverifiable, however effective as alliteration. We must imagine that some early wit once said: “It's so cold in X that when you try to say something, your words freeze and fall to the ground.” As a matter of fact, something very similar was attributed by Plutarch to one Antiphanes. In a chapter of the Moralia entitled “How a man may become aware of his progress in virtue” we find this anecdote:

Antiphanes said humorously that in a certain city words congealed with the cold the moment they were spoken, and later, as they thawed out, people heard in the summer what they had said to one another in the winter; it was the same way, he asserted, with what was said by Plato to men still in their youth; not until long afterwards, if ever, did most of them come to perceive the meaning, when they had become old men.