Within months Keller had learned to feel objects and associate them with words spelled out by finger signals on her palm, to read sentences by feeling raised words on cardboard, and to make her own sentences by arranging words in a frame.
The more genuine argument to be had concerns the writer's "moral obligation to be intelligent" — in John Erskine's immortal coinage — and, by extension, the moral obligation to write well, to choose self-assertion over mere self-expression, to raise words above the enervated ruck and make the world anew.
Notably, he said that Compass is in a position where it didn't need to raise — words that must be some of the most welcome ones that any investor hears as the term sheets are drawn up — but "this latest round of funding gets us steps closer, faster".
In the end, Rangers fans sat back for years and barely raised a word of complaint as their club was abused and misused.
"I had a meeting here last month with the German choreographer Pina Bausch and the Spanish film director Pedro Almodovar, and nobody once raised the word 'mafia,' " Francesco Giambrone, director of Teatro Massimo, said wistfully.
There was no talk of arguments among the staff, no discussion of the military options that Mr. Bush rejected, and no hint that any of Washington's coalition partners raised a word of objection about anything.
The orphans of forgetting are any kid who's in that shadow of negligence and who is therefore more susceptible to being raised by words and ideologies than by humans who have words and ideologies.
"I was raised on words," he once wrote.
And yet when Obama got to the lectern at Parks's funeral he betrayed no emotion, raised no words of protest.
… Obama's anger, which is rarely discernible in his voice or in his demeanor, ran deep.… And yet when Obama got to the lectern at Parks's funeral he betrayed no emotion, raised no words of protest.
