Mis Palabras Grandes

I’ve been thinking. I want to put some of my thoughts down. Let me say how I feel, let me say how I feel before it gets burdened down by my inculcated tendency to use big words. Doi! I can’t stop. Have to be on the look-out. You see, I’ve been accused of using too big of words-- words like monsters so fast that they come out of the cave of my mouth and eat up all the little words while they have their backs turned (The little words share the same cave).

Let’s be honest. We don’t need gigantic, presumptuous words in the English Language if we have all the smaller ones that make them up anyway. Like instead of saying, “I was flummoxed,” why don’t we just say “I just didn’t get it—it was so retarded, like ‘what the heck…’” . Why do I default to saying: “That’s so archaic,” when I could say “That’s so last…(insert time period, month, year, etc.).” The other thing about big words is that they are inconsiderate of other’s space and time. Like bad guests, or the guy I sat by today on the bus. Who has time to text (or, gosh, for that matter, even speak) a word like ambivalent? People are offended by these words, and rightly so. The other day, I used “harbinger” in a conversation, and my friend looked at me as though I had just yanked her braids. Confronting a new word is like being forced to be talk to someone you haven’t been introduced to. Like what… you’re supposed to stop the conversation and ask a name, or what the word means? Both instances…so rude. I’m so excited that we’re cnslidting everything. I didn’t get it before, but I mean, like now that I have a life and a phone, I see that ‘breviations are the future. Look out, SOS, because, like, what’s more universal than the language of LOL?

Jk.

Ha ha.

Fellow English Majors and lovers of truth, beauty and goodness: don’t banish me to outer darkness to trudge beside the Twilight series— not just yet, anyways.

All joking and satire aside, I sometimes feel troubled by the way I can’t transmit everything that I feel or want to express into words. I should be an expert on this, by now, right? I mean-- having come so far in the study of my own language and its literature, you would think I'd have it down pat. But there’s something elusive about words and thoughts and the way they come together (or sometimes die trying). Believe me, there have been volumes written on this, so I won’t go into the theory of it now. Maybe you know what I’m talking about. The common saying is “Cat got your tongue?” You’ve felt it? (Personally, I’m not exactly sure how much of the trouble has to do with my tongue. But if you like cats, tongues, or have a quirky sense of humour like me, you should check this out.)

I used to view words like they were proud, seafaring vessels which bore our thoughts and ideas over oceans and onto to foreign shores—- ambassadors, if you will, between individuals, groups, nations. Sometimes the ships would transport just down a shoreline, from harbor to harbor, to disperse value and work out meaning within the system of one mind. But sometimes, the ship-words aren’t strong enough to carry the thought, and, topheavy, sink. Or the ship-word is too large to carry the thought, and it gets blown off course to meander in a sea of ambiguity and confusion until they too become lost and forgotten.
Or… like I have this great idea… but how can I narrow it down without using words? Or--and this might be the worst of the afflictions-- when I have a whole flock of ideas surging through my brain, wild-fire like, but I can’t make the words come fast enough to capture the impressions, can’t find the right ones to embrace them, and the thoughts escape like doves of light toward the sky, never to be recaptured. The ones I do manage to catch lose some of their luster, they whimper like caged nightingales. And I sigh, wistfully wishing there was some better way to speak what I think and feel. To say what I mean and to mean what I say. That would be something.

Writing is hard. Communication is hard. Maybe that’s why we have tried all the other ways we know to do it. Art, photography, film. Everyone knows music exists precisely because what it expresses can’t be contained by words.

But I will still try. I have read writing that soars above the daily grind, and is able-- in one swift, fluid motion-- to communicate not only content, but beauty—the type of beauty that threads like silver through the very warp and weft of the textual fabric. I have heard the people speak with power-- because they have something to say and not just the urge to say something. Language is a gift, one which, I believe, we are still opening.