As it happens, the English language has a word for almost everything around…

The delight is always s to discover: a thing is called you'd never thought twice need be. "Newel," names one such you've probably court' or kissed and bent--and kissed--across; and more than love lights burning. Or even, stars. Or rump-rutched, a boy's bottom of the long and taboo'd slide. Or pondered, as a two-year-old, its cage of painted spindles. How many times have you watched Jimmy Stewart pull the newel post cap (and there's another not-there name) while you prepared to ball all over. Again.

All of us use truck parts indirectly, and few could call them what they are. But these other things, bound up in ritual of every day so tightly, objects so without need of direct effort: a space in language with near the grace of best of words. "Newel" is, to my ear, beautiful, and I remember how delighted I was when I first learned it. Almost more beautiful is: how falling rays illuminate the emptiness when name manifests as need of name itself, in the event of some thisveryword's first utterance. A moment in the stream of language, full with all the poignancy of innocence lost.