If You're Feeling Directional
Upward and onward

I love the -ward words. upward. forward. onward. Even wayward and downward hold a positive charge. There is a messianic American Puritanism in these words that I identify with a strongly swung pendulum, all Calvinist pull and sway. When I look up the etymology I learn of -weard (Old English) from a Germanic (of course!) root meaning 'turn.' To move up- or east- or home- involves a necessary transformation, whether one arrives intact or dissolves into a fiery crash. In high school the driver's ed teacher taught us about momentum and kinetic energy and motion and centrifugal force, and it was the most vivid course in physics I ever got, even if accidentally useful, because my father actually taught me to drive on a manual '89 Taurus, and the actual physics classes mostly involved our Vietnamese teacher's futile attempts at getting a prominent Supreme Court… Read More...