I had a conversation with a friend the other day about liking big words, and it made me think. One of my greatest frustrations in debate is when someone says, “well, that’s just semantics”. It may be semantics, but when you think about it, semantics is pretty much all we’ve got. If you say that’s a chair and I say it’s a table, one of us is going to have a very messy meal. What we mean may be more important than how we say it, but it doesn’t matter ‘a hill of beans’ (as my grandma would say) unless we are understood to mean what we think we just said.
When I was in university we read a theorist named Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. She was known for being completely incomprehensibly brilliant. An example:
“What if the two projects of epistemic overhaul worked as dislocated and unacknowledged parts of a vast two-handed engine? Perhaps it is no more than to ask that the subject of the palimpsestic narrative of imperialism be recognized as ‘subjugated knowledge’…”
I wrote a paper in which I argued that it was important for her to write in such an obscure way precisely because the concepts she was writing about had been obscured by the words we had so far tried to use to describe them. Although I think I still agree with myself, when I read the paper now I can’t understand a word of it.
The best thing about pieces of language, the perfect word, is the ability to say something no other word says in exactly the same way.
Take onomatopoeia, for instance. How fabulous that we have a word to describe words that sound like themselves. Or incremental . A word that makes you work at it. Or exquisite. A completely self-indulgent word that sounds like it’s leaking something vaguely obscene from the edges, but still, a good word in the right context.
And, of course, a word doesn’t have to be big to be strong. Take broken, curiosity, rotation, witness, depth, terror, reason, remember, some, bruise, quiet, slippery, burn, wind, tarnish. I could rattle off favourites forever. Some of them have a kind of internal rhythm. Some of them feel really good in your mouth. Some of them feel good to get out. Some of them are sharp, others are squishy. God, I love words. This is probably part of why I find it so hard to learn another language. I’m so smitten with the one I’ve got, it’s hard to make room for another. Well, okay, that probably doesn’t have anything to do with it, but at least, as excuses go, it has some poetry.
So, wait, what was I saying? Basically, that it’s good to be understood but we mustn’t forget that understanding sometimes takes some work. It’s not just about keeping it simple – but paying attention and saying what we mean, even if it does involve a multitude of syllables.
And you, what are your favourite words?
3 comments:
Rotund, abstemious, salubrious, quintessential, apocalyptic, indignant, dyspeptic, kumquat, thrum, flatulent, perimenopausal, hallelujah, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, indubitably, sigh, evensong, freckle. Oh: and palimpsestic.
serendipitous, querulous, languid, cacophony, gloam, whisper,
divine....
The ones you use without being quite sure that you know what they mean. But they sound right so you forge ahead and hope no one will notice. Like parapatetic, which now that I think about it, might not actually be a word. (I just checked. I don't think it is. But there is a closely related word that's spelt paraparesis which is defined as: a medical condition in which both legs, and often the bladder, have very little voluntary control...).
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