Carl Wernicke was a German neurologist who thought he knew how the brain processed language, but was wrong. From that, he probably doesn’t sound like the best person to name a creative writing blog after, but let me explain.
This tumblelog was started by the same guy who blogs over on postlinguistics. Over there, you’ll find all kinds of interesting tidbits about language and linguistics.
tics, plus the usual quotes, music, and photos you find on most personal tumblelogs. You could say the theme of that site is “Language as art—” in other words, human language is something you can appreciate for its own sake, because it’s amazing.
Here, though, the theme is more like “Language as an art.” I’m talking about the aesthetic dimension of language—storytelling, and the the act shaping
language to your will and creating something beyond lines of text. It’s about giving words purpose, or you might say:
Making words work, rather than working on words.
It’s in honor of this idea that this blog is named after a German neurologist. I mislead you a little; Dr. Wernicke did a lot of things right, including discovering Wernicke’s area, the part of the brain responsible for comprehension. So that little nugget of tissue, like this blog, exists at the meeting point between linguistics and literature.
Making words work, rather than working on words.
