Love Words

     Every so often I get stuck on a word, using it to excess, permitting it to pepper pretty much everything I say.

     I’m usually unaware that I’m doing this, blithely blabbing away repetitively, noticing it only after someone points it out – often to mortifying mirth – or, sometimes, in an attempt to squeeze it into every possible sentence, I contort its meaning so much that even I begin to detect my unconscious infatuation with the word.

     My first word crush was with “humongous.”  And what a humongous crush it was!  The roller coaster was humongous, the center on the other team was humongous, that hill we rode our bikes down was humongous, the booger he flicked at my head was humongous.  You get the idea.  Pretty soon “humongous” morphed into an all-purpose modifier meaning something along the lines of “really big, really memorable, really cool, or all of the above.”  And then one day one of the guys gave me a weird look, and asked what the hell “humongous” meant anyways, and why was I always saying it, and I realized then and there that I’d fallen in love with a word and I couldn’t admit that in front of the guys so I looked down and resolved to never utter it again. 

     And I didn’t, assisted, I’m sure, by this serial monogamist’s ability to shift his affections quickly and completely from word to word, usually unconsciously.  I’ve loved and left so many words, I can’t remember most of them.  Only a few stick out.  I recall with shame my liberal use of “bathetic” and “plebeian” during my young snob days.  How pathetic.  Oh, and I overused “pathetic” then too.  “Concatenation,” “synchronicity,”and “serendipity” somehow had their days in the sun.  I’ll never succeed in submerging the painful memories of working the word “heuristic” into most of my grad school conversations for a month or so.  What the hell was I thinking?   And most painful of all was my realization, late in life, that I’d not only been overusing the word “excoriate,” I’d been mispronouncing it so that it sounding like “excruciate,” which is exactly how it felt when a work colleague pointed it out to me in a packed conference room.

     The other day I realized I’d fallen for a new word after catching myself using it for the fiftieth time since lunch.  My new love word is “absurd.”  Their aggressive position on that issue is absurd.  The shiny spinning rims on that Hummer are absurd.  The Hummer itself is absurd.  My need for disco music is absurd.  The President is absurd.  The other side, they’re absurd too.  Television is all absurd.  Writing anonymous blog posts that reveal while they conceal is just absurd.  Trudging through an incredibly fortunate life under a perpetual cloud of depression is, well, so absurd it’s depressing.  It’s all absurd. 

     And then I checked the dictionary definition, saw that “absurd” has two meanings, one of them “ridiculously unreasonable, unsound, or incongruous” and I thought, yeah, that’s exactly how things seem to me.  Nothing makes sense.  Everything is wrong.  All I see are contradictions.  Life is imbalanced.  There is no point.  And then I read the other definition, for “absurd” as a noun, as in “the absurd,” and it was:

the state or condition in which human beings exist in an irrational and meaningless universe and in which human life has no ultimate meaning

and I thought EXACTLY!  It is all The Absurd.  What a great word.  No wonder I’m so attached to it.  And, to illustrate the absurdity of it all, at the same time I’m feeling this frisson of rare pleasure with this discovery of my new love interest, I know that my predilection to see the absurd in everything is at the very root of my depression.  Dwelling on the absurd, I’m like a smoker with lung cancer puffing away, or an alcoholic with cirrhosis drinking away.  I know this, yet I do it anyways.  Maybe I can’t stop.  Or maybe I can, and choose not to.  Either way, it’s all so absurd. 

Comments

[DarkoV]

Rather than saying I'm at a loss for words, let me trot out my overused word of the month. I've been stricken (perhaps self-stricken) with aphasia. I'm at the last stop on the ever-tightening verbal nautlius shell. Words that seem to seep down through tend to be monosyllabic.
Aphasia is one step up from grunting, I believe.

[robert]

One of my college lit profs killed "The Absurd" for me. I loved the guy, and I admired him for being an actual writer (and former sixties SF hipster in the western earthy guy mode), but an awful lot of things seemed ultimately to be symptoms of The Absurd for him. Why? Judging from his ruddy cheeks and misshapen nose, it may have been the alcohol.

My own love affairs often arise from dilemmas I'm working through. A current hobbyhorse (at least that I'm aware of) is "shibboleth." So many word choices seem like shibboleths, serving more to identify the writer's membership in some implicit faction or school of thought than communicate actual ideas. Listening to myself and others, the concept continually bubbles up. I fear my stabs at reason and straight talk are little more than the lonely bleatings of an incongruously pompous sheep.

[R.T.]

A friend of mine, after intensively studying the ancient histories of Greece and Rome, took a trip to the land of time past; to Europe. They roamed the ruins and the cathedrals and the shrines and the galleries and monuments, from Spain, to Italy, to Greece and France. Toward the end of the their trip as they were standing at the foot of the Colliseum, her husband lamented the wars and the slavery and the abuses and the crimes and the greed and the innocent lives lost and forgotten since Homer's Odyssey. She too, had been feeling the pain of what had been built through suffering, then lost again, the seemingly endless, meaningless cycle. When suddenly, she realized something. Nothing really new. Just that sudden "aha" moment when what is plainly obvious becomes truly understood.

"What's really left?" She asked him.

"Rubble. Some scultures. Corinthian style columns. Some artifacts and ancient attempts to flush out a democracy. Bits of writing. The arguments of philosophers disagreeing with each other over centuries." He replied willingly, then added with a cynical grin. "The lessons we are doomed to repeat?"

"Love."

Snickers from him. "You're a romantic. An optimist. You want to see the good in everything."

"I don't see it. I don't see it at all." She said. "But that doesn't matter because it's here anyway. It doesn't need to be written or followed or learned or even felt. It isn't even good or bad. It just is."

"That's as absurd as Napoleon's quest to rule the world."

"Of course. It's more than that. Love defines and defies the absurd. It IS the absurd. It is what does not make sense at any time or any place. It's what lives, no matter how much you try to master it or erase it or smear it or destroy it. It's what causes this and what defies that. It's what's left after the stupidity and the brilliance. After all the plots and schemes and decimation of the generations. And you are right; there is nothing more absurd than that. Love is the absurd in everything. It is the ultimate extremity, the ultimate blashphemy to all the plots and plans. In a world full of pain and suffering, in a world doomed to repeat the mistakes that went before it, love is the ultimate absurdity."

"Yeah, well. I'll have to think about that."

"It still won't make any sense."

[marlyat2]

Love words.

Reminds me of Welty's "love for words upon words, words in continuation and modification, and the beautiful accretion of a sentence" (talk about form fitting content! "One Writer's Beginnings.)

[Thane Plambeck]

how bourgeois.

[andrew]

bourgeois, maybe a touch...

but absurd? not at all...

unless you reject all attempts to view ones own bobbing about in the rotting river of time/humanity as absurd..

doesn't the word "absurd" itself sound like it should be some kind of exotic food? something you find in the international food isle, and smear on crackers...

[ehj2]

what it feels like to me is an intoxicating beverage, slightly poisonous, that might sit next to the absinthe bottle in a small quiet bar nestled away on an empty street.

and while the bottle says "absurd," what it really contains is awareness of the absurd. you remain a human infant if you never drink at all, but you shatter your joy of the heavens around you if you drink all the time.

it's good to know all knowledge is empty, that everything is futile, that we all end up on the dung heap of history. and it's also good to know that this is alright. and all will be well.

i know. i'm absurd.

but for me the woman who spoke about love was right. without my love, i would be just a rag blowing in the wind.

/ehj2