I’ve gotten some early responses to my attempt to describe words that sound true of themselves, and I thought I’d pass them along. A linguistics professor at Swarthmore points out that Russian linguists have a term for these words, obrazopodrazhatel’no, which means, literally, “form-mimetic.” I think I’ll stick with my suggestion: agenbite.

Another writer observes that some, though not all, of this phenomenon is created by what linguists call a “phonestheme.” Coined back in the 1930s by J.R. Firth, the term names the fact that, for unknown reasons, certain sounds are associated with a particular genus of objects or actions. So, for instance, the phonestheme “gl-” appears in a surprising number of words about light: glitter, glisten, glow, gleam, glare, glint, etc.

A reader, Mannie Sherberg, emails to note another phonestheme, with an initial “bl-” occurring in words about speech with a negative connotation: blab, blah-blah-blah, blandish, blankety-blank, blarney, blaspheme, blather, bleat, bleep, blither, blooper, bloviate, blowhard, blubber, bluff, blurt, bluster.

But Firth’s observation of phonesthemes is only part of what we mean by agenbites—a process by which some of them get formed, as we come to associate certain sounds with a particular genus, which helps those words sound true.

Meanwhile, readers have sent in or listed on their websites other words that seem to them agenbites. Maybe most interesting is Wendy V.’s suggestion of the category of anti-agenbites. I had said that words like perspicacious failed to be agenbites, but Wendy observes that pulchritude is more than a failure; it’s a full-blown anti-agenbite: a word that sounds false about itself.

My friend Fr. Edward Oakes, S.J., emails: “Frizzy sounds frizzy to me; frazzled too. And can’t you just hear the fizz in fizzy?,” which suggests there’s a phonestheme in that z-sound, though the origin may be in the onomatopoeia of fizz. Another readers writes in with “Phlegmatic—A word that tends to linger too long (if one is not careful) in the back of the throat.” In the teaser for a link to the article on Arts & Letters Daily, another friend, Denis Dutton, couldn’t resist adding his own example of puny.

Let’s see, what else? One blogger and his commenters suggest mucilage, piffle, ponnnnnnnnntificate, drone, bumptious, luscious, and juicy. Another adds nostrum, and yet another suggests the surname Bottum.

The formalist poets who meet on the website Eratosphere add weird, darken, luff, pluck, relinquish, runt, straddle, stun, tuft, and other possibilities.

Send in more, if ideas come to you.

I was stunned. I have been teaching college freshmen for about thirty years in big state institutions, elite conservatories, smallish private universities, and Christian colleges, and I’d never seen anything like it.

Like many of us reading these pages, I was in the middle of that spring migration known as “bringing the kid home from college for the summer break” (and, we hope, the summer job). My daughter and I were having breakfast at the local diner with seven of her friends (who had helped us schlep her gear to the car–always a good idea to reward cheap labor), and I was asking them about their first year in college. What did they like about it? What didn’t they? What were the big surprises, how were the roommates? All those kinds of questions I’ve learned are fairly innocuous ways to get to know 19-year-olds and to pick up a little local flavor and some entertaining gossip. After a couple of sentences complaining about the food, they were ignoring me and talking between themselves. Talking about Aristotle. And Plato. About the nature of virtue in the Nicomachean Ethics and how Verdi captured love of country in “Va pensiero” from Nabucco. (“I’m not Italian, but I cry every time I sing it,” one of the girls said.) And what they were most excited about was coming back in the fall and studying the Bible. And the Gospel of John. In Greek. Like I said, I was stunned.

These kids loved ideas. And they spoke knowingly about them, but without arrogance or a pretended sophistication. They weren’t showing off for the visiting daddy professor; they were just doing at breakfast what they had been doing since September: thinking, and thinking about important things seriously but happily, too. (The importance of “fun” was part of the discussion.) The talk hadn’t been pushed in that direction, it happened naturally. These young men and women were truly college students. Studeo, from the Latin, “to be eager or zealous for.” They were eager for understanding. They had just finished their freshman year at St. John’s College in Annapolis—and they could hardly wait to get back.

There has been a lot written recently about just how miserable our baccalaureate education has become. Excellence Without a Soul, by Harvard’s Harry R. Lewis, Our Underachieving Colleges by Derek Bok, Declining by Degrees edited by Richard Hersh and John Marrow and Tom Wolfe’s novel I Am Charlotte Simmons (which Yale undergraduates faulted primarily for painting too rosy a view of undergraduate life)—and the list just gets longer. Listen to the disappointed distain with which almost any college junior describes the “core” classes he had to take during his first two years—English 101, Speech 110, Life Sciences 210, etc.—and you come to the conclusion that Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Matt Damon got it right: The most important thing about college is dropping out.

But St. John’s isn’t the typical college. No electives, no majors, everybody takes the same curriculum and the faculty (called “tutors”) are expected to be as perennially curious as the students. There’s no rating from U.S. News and World Reports (St. John’s refuses to participate—why should they surrender their data simply to boost the circulation of a magazine?), and while there are sports teams the main athletic/social event is a yearly croquet match against the Naval Academy.

Like most campuses a certain amount of public drunkenness is tolerated but cocaine use does get you expelled. (Yes, I know, now you’re stunned too.) It’s a demanding and largely unique regimen, and I’m told that there’s a fairly high attrition rate both among freshman and new faculty. But what St. John’s is doing is producing young people who are passionate about ideas and confident that they can both grasp ideas and let them shape their lives. This isn’t what we’re doing with our undergraduates in the rest of the country. I think we’d better find out what’s up at St. John’s before all our students figure out that their spiraling tuition bills aren’t being matched by wisdom gained and follow Misters Jobs, Gates, and Damon out of our classrooms.

“What about the higher law, the law of love?” So pleads the lesbian presidential speechwriter in David Mamet’s latest Broadway comedy, November. The waddling, squawking, lame-duck president is at his wits end. Clarice won’t give him the speech transcript that offers him a feather of a chance to win the reelection (or at least build that indispensable post-term commodity, a presidential library). She won’t give him the speech–unless he agrees to marry her and Daisy.

It’s against the law, the president tries to plead. You’re the president. But I can’t break the law, can I? If it’s right, you can make it law. It’s not right if it’s illegal. It’s legal if you say it’s legal! Is it legal because it’s right? Is it right because it’s legal? What is right? What is legal?!

The California Supreme Court, the media is loudly proclaiming, yesterday struck down a state ban on same-sex marriages. “This decision will give Americans the lived experience that ending exclusion from marriage helps families and harms no one,” the director of Freedom to Marry exalted. What families?, one might reply. Certainly not families as we know them, in any natural sense of the word. Maggie Gallagher of the National Organization for Marriage is emphatic: “The history and interpretation of marriage laws make it clear that this idea that marriage has something to do with responsible procreation was not invented in order to discriminate against gay people, but has deep roots in our legal tradition in all 50 states and the United States.”

It’s not tax breaks and hospital-visit privileges that the 110,000 same-sex Californian couples are after. They have those already through comprehensive domestic legal partnership legislation. What they want is full acceptance, affirmation, validation. And legal partnership falls short. “Marriage,” wrote Chief Justice Ron George, carries the “understanding that this word describes a family relationship unreservedly sanctioned by the community.” And if gays and lesbians cannot really call themselves married, this fact “realistically must be viewed as constituting significantly unequal treatment to same-sex couples.”

Does legality make something right? And does legality make an act suddenly be “unreservedly sanctioned by the community”? To the second question, the answer is certainly no. Not suddenly, in any case; few people are so governmentally compliant in their basic understandings, beliefs, and traditions that they will change heart and mind overnight. Webster can define a giraffe as a tree, but that doesn’t subvert the way you or I or anyone else has to see it. But say it long enough, teach it to someone just learning the meaning of those words, and the concept of tree becomes blurry indeed.

Verbal obfuscation does not just lead to mental confusion; it can also lead to moral–personal and societal–confusion. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese somberly predicted: “The freedom for gays and lesbians to marry will decisively contribute to disaggregating all of the remaining social institutions that provide the foundations for any collective resistance against political and economic domination. Contrary to many prevailing views, marriage is not the seat of oppression but rather the last best ground for resistance against it. In binding men and women into loving relations and shared purposes, marriage acknowledges the reality of sexual difference even as it works to bridge that difference and lay a foundation for a vital and, yes, grown-up social life.”

As for the first question, “Does legality make something right?,” we might return to Mamet’s Clarice, grasping for the nature of love: What is right? What about the higher law?