Words
"Teach me a word," asks a high, girlish voice. Undoubtedly, it is the same voice I have heard on a recording from the time and found it difficult to recognize as my own. I was sitting in the back seat of my father's car on one of our annual trips to Waikaremoana. My father liked to lecture his children and was always dropping rare or unusual words into the monologue. When I was ten or eleven, I admired this habit of his and tried to imitate him. Today I'm not so sure that he was purely motivated by a love of language. He evinced no interest whatsoever in literature, owned few books, and scarcely read anything other than the newspaper. I suspect that language for him was a form of sabre-rattling, a weapon to daunt and cow an enemy. An enemy was anyone who did not agree with him. He was a lawyer.
“All right,” he said. I see him drumming the steering wheel as he gazes thoughtfully into the parallatic rush of power poles, hedgerows, clapboard farmhouses. A tendon in his neck twitched. "How about lugubrious?" I asked him what it meant and he defined it, rather lazily, I would later discover, as “sad.” He then delivered some kind of homily on the power of words and encouraged my interest in them. He even promised to teach me a new word everyday. But we both eventually forgot his promise and "lugubrious" is one of only a handful of words he ever taught me. Dull reading, perhaps, but what interests me here is not the biographic detail but the way words acquire their own tastes and smells, their own textures. For each of us, the words we encounter gradually develop a personal sense in addition to the shared semantic one. For me, the word lugubrious has, since the age of ten, contained the whir of new tyres on a macadamized road as clearly as a seashell contains the sound of the ocean. It gives off the faint synesthetic odor of polyester upholstery. Its mnemonic aura is an afterimage of my father's twitching neck tendon, his fingers drumming, a viatic blur of cattle pastures and irrigation swamps out the passenger window of his car. I write this not with nostalgia but something like regret. We do not choose the associations words indelibly acquire, but we must live with them. Whenever I come across this harmless word "lugubrious" in a book, my enjoyment is necessarily interrupted by the phantom back aches of long, dimly recalled road trips. It evokes the ghost of motion sickness and the unpleasant tension I always felt in his volatile presence. I write of these associations in the hope of exorcising them and creating new ones. Numerous other words could be added to this personal glossary. For example: As an image of sky, trees and buildings can indwell a tiny crystal sphere, the word ubiquitous holds and interminably replays for me an episode from my second year at college. Driving up Queen Street one afternoon, my girlfriend and I noticed and laughed at a very tall and thin man of about twenty in red farmer's overalls. He was walking in the opposite direction but when we drove to the very top of that long, steep street and saw the same man standing on the corner. What secret loophole in the fabric of space and time had he exploited in order to arrive there so quickly? Dumbfounded, we drove back to the bottom of the Queen Street, crossed Customs Street East, turned right and drove along the quay. It could only have taken us a minute or two but there, impossibly, unmistakably, we now saw the same red-overalled man galumphing along the waterfront... We both become quite hysterical, and for some time afterwards, would tell the story to anyone who would listen. I called him the Ubiquitous Man. I explained the word to Sarah—I myself had just learned it from the pocket dictionary I nerdishly carried with me everywhere, and she thought it was very apt. Thereafter we invoked his name with a kind of hilarious incredulity and superstitious misgiving—until we saw the same two identical and identically dressed twins sitting at a cafe together and the mystery was solved. It was also during my first year at college that the word, opulent acquired its rosy blush and associated muscular sensation of clenching teeth. One morning, I arrived at school to find a crowd standing in the colonnade. A student, protesting against a recent hike in tuition fees, had painted "Greg Whitecliffe is a thief" on the lawn in diesel. Greg Whitecliffe was the president of the college. The diesel had yellowed the words clearly on the lawn and the janitor was already busily reseeding them. "Was it you, Ben?" someone asked. Everybody laughed. "No," I said. "I would have written something a little more opulent." "Don't you mean eloquent?" asked the same voice. Everybody laughed again. I could add to this list but I think I have made my point. New words are sterile and odorless, like a glass of perfectly distilled water. But the words we use and misuse become mired with our fingerprints and develop an extraneous texture of meaning. This idea has implications that are worth pondering. The results of a chemical experiment may be contaminated or skewed due to traces of matter from a previous experiment on the scientist's implements. How many arguments have been lost or won, how many conversations have gone awry, or fallen into place, not because of the known and agreed-upon meanings of words, but because of an unnoticed sympathy or discord between the subliminal associations that certain words had for one of the communicants? |