Words, Those Squishy Things

Yes, I do love words, and I couldn’t have said that without them. I love their sound, their layers of meaning and the long journey they’ve undertaken to get here. One has to admire their elasticity, how they can stretch, bend and bounce. There is nothing more organic, rising into usage from someone’s mouth into the common tongue if it has the legs for it.

I just read an article about a sports team described as exceedingly mediocre. That was worth a sudden smile. Give me an oxymoron and I’m happy. One of my favorites is Dark White. but the most famous is probably from the Bard whose Juliet parted with such sweet sorrow.

This got me thinking about possible names for an ice cream flavor, Transcendental Fudge or Existential Sludge or MAGA Mud. Get Ben and Jerry on line one.

Words of endearment have a life of their own, uttered from some undisclosed location. Peggy and I had so many I can't remember any time we called each other by our given names.

I had names for my three daughters when they were mere tater tots. They are my aviary having each taken flight. Shari, my first-born, was Peanut Annie. Now, the strokes in her paintings move with a kinetic grace, a quiet ferocity.

Janice, my tiny one, now sixty-two, was Chester Apple. As a deaf person she knows the walls of this world and how to climb them. She orchestrates her life through fathoms of silence with fingers like a Dudamel butterfly.

Lauren had to live with Brewster Gazelle. She, in turn, dubbed me Chief Big Toe or Fatheringham. Consigned as she is to the middle of the muddle, she has grown elongated wing spans reaching from porcupine meatballs to Venus in transit.

Those names of endearment were all scrupulously deliberated blurts that somehow stuck, at least in my memory vault.

I must have heard a sort of music or cadence in the syllables of Brewster Gazelle which later morphed to Brewster Gazelleshaft. Maybe I was influenced by the German term Gesellschaft but meaning has little to do with all this. Otherwise, I would have chosen Gemeinshaft. Look it up if you want to impress someone at a cocktail party.

Probably the best string of meaningless words is Fuckingbastardsonofabitch uttered by me only once in my life in a slapping, scratching, punching fight I had with Peter Dalebrook at age 12, I would guess. It was my first and last physical fight and those words flew out of my mouth as my entire repertoire of expletives. I still hear a mellifluous incantation in those sounds though I don’t suppose they would have much success as an ice cream flavor.