Word laundry day
A good friend of mine once made me wonder about words. Some words, he said, have been worn so that they have practically become meaningless. Just like a piece of cloth that has been used too long to dust off the floor, some words have been darkened by too much wear and tear. Take a simple word, like "nice". Nicety used to be nicer, I guess. Today, it can either be used to mean that something or someone is good or kind, as it can also be used to determine that a person is okay, but maybe lacks some salt. Neither stinks nor smells, as we sometimes say here.
So today I am surveying my personal vocabulary and find those words that need a good laundry job, maybe hang a while in the sun to dry (here we use no driers) and maybe recover some spark. I am handwashing some, like "love" and "friend". They need special attention these days, don't they? "Love" sells McDonald's burguers here, it is repeated to death by good and bad songs, it might slip out of the tongue so easily sometimes. Poor worn out word, it requires some washing, a touch of softner, a hot iron (it requires warmth to look better) and careful folding. "Friend" sometimes become too casual, so it needs some gentle handling too. When my friend Joe was gone, I thought a lot about that word, and I've sworn never to let anyone else go without knowing how much they mean to me.
I love English and its words, and sometimes I love them just for the sake of their sounds, like "round" or "dwell" or "nibs" and "bins", or "brown" and "blue". Some of them I learned just too recently. A few of these sound so imperial and heavy that they need a good washing too. Words like "unquestioningly", "abide", "preclude", "mandatory" even small ones like "claim" and "grant". A load for verbs, a load for nouns, a totally separate load for adjectives, because as everyone knows, they may stain the whites.
Word cleansing is a slow process. It takes time and a scrupulous eye to examine one by one and find those stubborn spots, the tiny grease marks that remain before you are able to recover sparkling clean words.
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