ABSTRACT
Words are root-trailing victuals, just as fruits and vegetables are words upwelling from a soil's chemical grammar, forming puns of organic resemblance and parables of fibre and flavour. Indeed, such lipped words give a reader/taster objects to chew upon. The sun-receiving landscape itself is a language and a food: Massachusetts is a chewed mass of geologic upheaval. Henry David Thoreau is likewise interested in overlaps between the orthographic and the aural, in which the page-bound recipe for a word and its self-savouring pronunciation share some common essence. The alertness to language's material embodiment leads Thoreau to frame his own writing as a morally medicinal 'dose' and to deploy derogatory food similes for less-skilled language use. The Latin word for seed, sema, invokes semantics and semiotics, and a seed is a comma in Thoreau's botanical orthography, a crucial pivot on a continuum.
