In New Bearings, Leavis speaks of ‘words that lie there arranged on the page’ as ‘dead’; they ‘have no roots: the writer can never have been more than superficially interested in them’. What does it mean for words to ‘lie there’, to be ‘dead’, to be without ‘roots’, to demonstrate somehow an inadequacy of interest from their author? The terms Leavis uses are suggestive, evoking others: empty, inert, lacking investedness, lacking care, without source or foundation, floating, unanchored, disconnected, surfaces, façade. Arranged appears pejorative here, but elsewhere it is used neutrally, indeed with such neutrality it almost raises wonder at what words can do, as in the Swift essay, or the urge to ‘keep closely enough in touch with responses to particular arrangements of words’, or the reference to a poet’s ‘verbal arrangements’. So there being an arrangement to dead words isn’t what renders them ‘dead’; rather, it’s their deadness that makes ‘arrangement’ inert, such that there is something posed in their deliberateness, something static. The reference to ‘dead’ outlines the importance of ‘roots’, the words’ source, and, concomitantly, of their direction or orientation. The fascinating thing is how ‘dead’ words are individually—sometimes even collectively—the same as those most alive. So much depends on context, atmosphere, mood, placement and build-up, positioning, implications, momentum. The difference concerns the attitudinal realm, the mode of being the words give off. As we’ve seen, a key component of creating this mode of being, whatever it is, concerns the attitude behind the words, the relationship to them, the approach to handling them. Source and direction are connected; both underscore the importance of language’s relationality, its interaction with its own mode of use, its own orientations and horizons.