Wednesday, January 7, 2015 // The Statement
7B
T
he word mostly sits there unpondered. But beneath
it patiently tugs its historical baggage, all smudged
with connotation and etymology and by roots of
dead languages. The word is remarkable. The word is a
minute palimpsest.
Whenever I ask my dad to proofread my essays, his
Markup Word document comes back with a dense ladder
of blue boxes, all variations of “John Gonzalez deleted the
word autotelic” or “John Gonzalez replaced the word lacu-
na with gap.” I diligently heed the comma insertions and
mend the split infinitives, but I keep the fancy words. My
dad sighs in frustration. To him, good writing is practical;
it communicates clearly and concisely.
But I love the words that puzzle and initially withhold,
yet once Googled, snap the sentence into alignment the way
the simple word couldn’t. Take the word susurrus, which
I first came across in Charles Wright’s “The Southern
Cross.” The word means “whispering, muttering, rustling.”
All three synonyms in the definition have an onomatopoeic
quality, but susurrus is particularly swaddled in its raspy
ss sounds.
The word rustle evokes the clumsy jostling of leaves in a
tree, but I imagine the susurration of leaves is finer, like a
rain stick gently tipped.
The perfect word can be clear, but it must be lyrical. The
perfect word shouldn’t worry about being recalcitrant to
the languid reader’s gaze. Send her to the dictionary! The
bon mot isn’t there to roll over and play dead. The word is
alive, goddamn it! Tell me the word tipple doesn’t bubble
effervescently on your tongue like a sip of champagne.
When I was reading “Lolita” a few years ago, I became
overwhelmed by Nabokov’s luscious prose. I mean that
hyperbolically, but also because I was reading an annotated
edition, densely peppered with footnotes which even still
couldn’t elucidate words like phocine (seal-like) and favo-
nian (of a western wind). I started a list on my iPhone and
it grew into the sprawling 15-page Word document I keep
continuously open on my computer.
I write down the words that bind an abstract concept
into a small bundle of syllables — a word like slatch, which
means an interval of fair weather. When I added that word,
it was July in Ann Arbor and amidst the thick, nagging
heat I couldn’t remember what a slatch was. Now that the
days are sharp and short, I pray in vain for slatches, but the
delight of the word itself is almost enough.
There are words that linger on the list that I’ve never
used: I’m never going to write down “Assignation with C.
– 9 p.m.” on my calendar, because assignation is one of the
un-sexiest words for an illicit affair.
Then there are words that I wish I used more, like parox-
ysm, which just by saying elicits the spontaneous, splutter-
ing onset of emotion it describes. I love words so saturated
with their meaning, they ooze on delivery.
It is funny that my dad is the most ardent crusader
against my more self-indulgent vocabulary (restraint was
used here to not substitute the word sybaritic), because he
is the one who instilled my love of lexicon.
Almost every morning in fifth grade, we would hunch
over the Word Jumble in the Union Tribune on the dining
table. He knew the answers of course, but bit his tongue,
letting me clench my teeth and scribble on the newspaper
until it was time to go to school.
It was also around this time that he gave me his bat-
tered copy of “Animal Farm” and, shortly after, “1984.” I
read them, absorbed probably nothing from them, but these
inductive tomes were important. Over the years, I read and
re-read them and by the time I was in junior high, I’d spent
so much time in “1984” that Orwell’s lucid yet evocative
prose felt mine as well.
Of course, Orwell detested the murky language of dou-
blespeak, but only because it obstructed his quest for preci-
sion of word and freshness of imagery. Too often, the fancy
word slackens the taut cord of a sentence, rather than yank-
ing it tighter. Hence, my ever-growing word list remains
perpetually perused, yet mostly unused.
But when the moment is right, I’m unafraid to use the
fancy word. For every utilitarian Orwellian sentence, there
is one by Nabokov, or, to return to my childhood, Snicket.
Lemony Snicket, that is: the erudite, elusive author who
penned my favorite series ever (sorry, Harry Potter), “A
Series of Unfortunate Events,” the sardonic post-modern-
lit books tamped with literary references. Snicket taught
me the words xenophobic (useful for a child of the Bush era)
and ennui (perfect later for a teenager prone to overstate-
ment), but more so, he illustrated how the fancy word could
pirouette spryly in the sentence between form and func-
tion.
The fancy word is adroit but aware of its witty immod-
eration, the guest at the cocktail party well-practiced with
nimble ripostes. And more than that, when Snicket said “I
know that having a good vocabulary doesn’t guarantee that
I’m a good person, but it does mean I’ve read a great deal.
And in my experience, well-read people are less likely to
be evil,” I smiled at the snark, but swallowed the message.
The fancy word pays homage to a literary history; it skirts
the stage of celebrity and zeitgeist — the fancy word will
not be Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year, it stubbornly
protests the modern art of Internet speed-reading. The
fancy word requests your attention and your intelligence,
but it compensates generously for your time. It is the visible
leaf in a long family tree of forgotten language and it asks
you to sift through its branches. In a moment when beloved
niche publications are being artlessly corporatized, raided
for efficiency and use value before being jammed into a
slick brand that slips off the mainstream tongue, the fancy
word is a petite protest. It demands more from language
and sentences and novels than easy consumption. It asks to
be critically considered.
ILLUSTRATION BY MEGAN MULHOLLAND
Personal Statement: On words and adoring them
by Catherine Sulpizio, Senior Arts Editor