There
are three words that have moved with me from house to house. They
were packed, unpacked, and left sitting on the mantelpiece in plain
view, next to the clock. Now I can’t find them. Maybe their shelf life
was past and someone threw them away without thinking. Words should come
with barcodes and a sell-by date.
I
looked in the back of the larder the other day and came upon some that
should have been chucked out years ago. Behind the unused squid-ink
pasta and the tins of alligator chowder from a long-forgotten holiday in
the Everglades, I found a little pile of them, redundant, mouldering
gently in their mildewed corner on the highest shelf. I peeled off a
couple and stuck them in a story: "decorous’ and "homilies", "felicity"
and "frivolous". I should really have given them a good rinse first.
Sepia words they were, predating date-stamps, and people commented on
the musty taste left in their mouths.
Slightly more recent words linger in my fridge. Look underneath the
processed cheese in its round red wax jackets and you’ll find "like,
whatever". I’ll clear that one out quickly and give the shelf a good
wipe down. I was lucky with "mutant hero turtles" and "transformers"—I
put them in the freezer for a few years and they came out again as good
as new. "Grotty" and "groovy" didn’t fare so well. I thawed them out the
other day and the whole family thought they had word
poisoning.
There
are rich fruitcake words double-wrapped in foil and grease proof paper,
pierced with a skewer and drizzled with cognac at regular intervals.
"Catechism" and "Compline" are kept like this, preserved, not looked at
often, their taste maturing year by year.
There
are a lot of cherry stone words at the moment. I’ve only just learned
how to spit them out.
I
love fat words; I suffer from word obesity: grandiloquence, quotation,
alliteration, assonance. I know I should go on a diet, cut out the
calories, stick to three solid, pared down stories a day with no snacks.
I’m not looking forward to it. Where’s the fun in that?
There
are a few outgrown words. They won’t come into their own again for me
now at my age, but I’ll keep them in a box in the attic, strap it up
with strong brown tape and pass them on to the next generation. Not
goo-goo noises, patronising words, tellytubby soundbites, but euphemisms
for functions not yet found unpleasant to a mother’s nose, like posset
and soft motions before they turn to teenage puke and crap. There are
soft words, too, gentle syllables of pampering, powdering, massaging,
creases and dimples, but those I’ll hang onto. It might be sooner than I
realize before they are needed again.
Some
of the juicy words are leaking through their packaging, overflowing,
dripping. I’ll wipe up the mess with a dishcloth. And put them away
again. Out of sight.
I
used to find some words quite scary—owls for a time and crocodiles, then
Halloween and Alien and surrealist stretched, warped, screaming words
like childbirth and blindness. It’s strange how you change. It’s the
longer, deeper words that hit me now: tachycardias and carcinomas, and
that more hygienic coinage by those doctors of letters: SVT, CCU, NSCLC,
ITU.
I
still can’t find those three little words that moved with me from home
to home. They were always propped up on the mantelpiece next to the
clock with all the other invitations. Maybe they went past their use-by
date and I dropped them into the fireplace without realizing what I’d
lost.
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