SOURCE: "About Language," in Ohio Review, 1994, pp. 7-19.

In the following essay, Fox explores the ability of language and stories, at their best, to concretize the ephemeral and ambiguous nature of universal experience and what Fox considers the unfortunate bastardizing of language in contemporary parlance.

Great stories give us metaphors that flash upon the mind the way lightning flashes upon the earth, illuminating for a instant an entire landscape that had been hidden in the dark.

In some sense all stories are metaphors. There is mystery in the way they make recognizable what we think we have not experienced. Four hundred years ago, Edmund Spenser, the English poet, wrote: "The story of any man's real experience finds its startling parallel in that of everyone of us." It is as though at the core of humanness, at least in young humans, there is a readiness for news not only...