My Life in Words
I am in college, traversing the campus, wearing a pink wool sweater, an aberration for me as I have always eschewed the color pink as too girlie. But this sweater was a gift from my father, and so I’m giving it a chance, noticing how different it makes me feel: softer and, dare-I-say feminine, which is not a bad way to feel at this moment when I am thinking about a boy. I have a crush on this boy, a desire to lose my virginity with him and, as I think of him, I am also thinking about the beautiful word he has taught me, ineluctable. He learned this word from reading James Joyce. Ineluctable, I say to myself. How mystical it sounds. Ineluctable, ineluctable, ineluctable. Is it inevitable that I will sleep with this boy?
Many people think of their lives in terms of the places they’ve lived, the jobs they’ve held, or the people they’ve been partnered with. Susan Minot’s wonderful story “Lust” is structured in terms of the boys she dated during high school. My father used to enjoy recounting the eras of his life as defined by the cars he and his family had owned. His first car was a Ford of some kind, and he rhapsodized about that car, though what he said about it I can’t recall. The details of cars don’t stick with me, not like the details associated with words.
For a period when I was in elementary or middle school our mother introduced us to a new word each day. I remember sitting at the swirled red kitchen table when she showed us the first word, written in bold magic-markered letters on a sheet of plain paper. Bizarre. How did she choose that word for her young daughters to learn? I now see it as a reflection of how she perceived the world back then. A lot she saw around her registered as bizarre. The word has proven to be enormously useful. What about our world these days is *not* bizarre?
My seventh grade English teacher, Mrs. Mahoney, was a force of nature, an actress manque who used the classroom as her stage. Each week she gave us a vocabulary list of ten words. I can still see her at the front of the classroom, leading us in pronouncing the words aloud as she gestured like a maestro to get us to speak up. Benevolent, beneficent, opulent, ostracize. So many words have remained with me from her class, along with the other things she had us memorize: the Quality of Mercy speech from The Merchant of Venice, and all the prepositions, both of which I can still recite. I cannot say the words benevolent and beneficent — along with a host of other words — without feeling Mrs. Mahoney’s lively presence hovering over my shoulder.
My older sister had a friend, whose name neither of us can recall, who once sent our mother a thank you note. “I am bereft of words…” the note began. How impressed we were — my mother, my sister, and I — by her use of that word bereft. She could have simply said, “I have no words,” but she opted instead for a more elevated, elegant word. I cannot hear the word bereft without thinking of that nameless woman’s soft voice and wavy hair. I wanted to be like her, choosing the elegant words.
Another word from college still stalks me, because I used it in a poem where it didn’t belong for the pure joy of seeing it on the page. Peregrination. I could have chosen the word traverse or walk, but I was determined to use the more interesting (effete) word, which I now chalk up to youthful experimentation, an essential rite of passage for any writer.
Another embarrassing memory has settled around the word accoutrements. When I was in film school I wrote that word into the script for my first sync-sound film. When we were filming the actress had trouble pronouncing the word seamlessly, and my film school crew mocked me mercilessly, right there on the set. “No one says that,” they insisted. So I took their advice and cut the word, and the shoot continued.
In my first job out of film school I was the assistant, then associate, editor on a feature-length documentary film. It was a plum job that lasted over a year, an experience of rapid learning and great comraderie, and I acquired a number of still-dear friends on that job. An English professor from Amherst Collect who wanted film experience on her sabbatical signed on to be my apprentice editor. What fun we had chatting as we organized our trim bins. I learned the word curmudgeonly from her, a word I was ashamed to admit I didn’t already know. Since then it’s been a word I have put to extensive use. Thank you, Margie. And Peter, on that same job, made liberal use of the word parse. I was acquainted with that word, but I had never known anyone to use it as frequently as Peter did, and whenever I use it now my thoughts drift to Peter.
Over my years of word-spelunking (thank you former brother-in-law for spelunking) I have gleaned many words from books. I appreciate writers like Michael Chabon and Cormac McCarthy who send me to the dictionary, as well as writers who remind me of interesting ways to use a more common word. Sue Miller’s use of the word pulse drew my attention in one of her books, and henceforth that word will forever be linked with her in my mind. From Jonathan Franzen I learned the delicious word cupreous, which means “of or like copper.” Any word that slides off the tongue so easily is a winner for me, and I have used that word in at least one of my novels.
I used to teach a class called “Deconstructing Style: Words, Sentences, The Atomic Particles of Fiction.” In that class the students kept word journals, every week selecting ten words they were drawn to and researching their etymology. When you know the origins of a word you use it far more carefully. Think about how crucible originates with the cross, or how the word vanilla is related to the Spanish word for sheath, vaina, which also gave rise to the word vagina.
I seem to have been hard-wired to this love of words, both their sounds and the way they appear on the page, and I feel fortunate that my native language is such a rich polyglot, not only of Latinate and Anglo-Saxon words, but also words borrowed from Native American tribes and dozens of other languages across the globe. In my haphazard word notebook, filled with scraps of scrawled-on napkins and Post-its, I have collected words that pique my imagination, far too many to list here. In revisiting that notebook today I came across the word agathokakological. It is, admittedly, a cumbersome word, not one I am likely to use in casual conversation, but I’m riveted by its meaning which is “composed of good and evil.” What a useful word for these post-Trumpian years! Here are a few more random words from my notebook for you to speak aloud and relish: ziggurat, darkle, percolate, yowl, flocculent, undulate, judder.
Maybe in my next life I’ll be reporting to you about cars, but in this life words are my jam, and it provides me with endless pleasure to notice and gather them.
