By now it should be about as obvious as an elephant in your bathtub, but I fucking love words. I have a fairly larger-than-average vocabulary--more than the average person's but perhaps not quite as mind-bogglingly vast as Shakespeare's--and words are probably the most important feature of my life. I'll even go as far as to say that spoken language ranks up with mankind's most important developments. Without language and its ability to communicate complex ideas in a way that makes them accessible and understandable to anyone who hears them, human beings would never have been able to take part in the large and cooperative endeavours that basically lay the groundwork for what we call 'civilization'. You are never going to form a complex and sustainable society or a society of any kind at all if everybody involved can't effectively share ideas with one another. You can't do an activity as simple as bringing down large game without having a way of telling the other members of your hunting party, "Okay, you guys chase the wildebeest herd and cut off the slow one, then herd it over the edge of this ravine and I'll wait at the bottom with a club to bash its head in."
So, yeah, I freaking love language. I love its limitless possibilities, what it has the power to do. It can evoke any emotion, inspire any kind of thoughts, entertain, teach lessons, and provide guidelines for every conceivable circumstance. I love being able to use language as I do. I love its flexibility--knowing ten words for one thing or one word for ten things.
Language is my bosom buddy.
And I think I know when and why my love of words began.
While I have a very clear memory of this event, I don't actually remember when it happened or how old I was at the time. Suffice to say it happened after I was a toddler but I was absolutely definitely no more than five or six years old--probably closer to five. It was a flash of realization for me, the moment in which I realized for the first time just how crucial words are, after which time I was determined to learn all the ones I could.
I remember it was a dinner occasion, probably at a restaurant, and for some unknown reason my parents decided it would be okay for me to have a cup of tea. (My parents were kind of weird about letting me have caffeine. They didn't want me to have it at all and I was actually completely forbidden to drink soda except at restaurants until I was about twelve or thirteen years old.) For some reason their momentary lapse in judgment also compelled them to let me decide how much sugar I wanted in it. I emptied a sugar packet into the cup and stirred it and was dismayed to look into the cup to see there were still granules of sugar floating around in it.
Since I'm pretty sure this happened while we were living in England, it makes sense that I'd at least be aware that sugar in tea is supposed to dissolve and not be drunk as whole grains of sugar. But the sugar wasn't dissolving and I didn't know why and because I came out of the fucking womb with complete and total neurosis, this bothered me.
My parents noticed I was somehow frustrated with my tea and asked me what was wrong, at which time I tried to explain that the sugar wasn't dissolving and it was supposed to and I didn't want to drink defective tea. But being five years old, I didn't know the word 'dissolve' and so had to utilize my existing vocabulary to communicate this problem to my parents.
And I couldn't do it.
I remember exactly what I told them to try and get my point across--I told them the sugar wasn't 'going in' or 'going away', which they interpreted as me being reluctant to drink the tea because it had too much sugar in it. Or that I'd spilled the sugar outside the cup. They didn't know what I meant when I was frustratedly telling them the sugar wasn't going into the tea and it was supposed to and it was driving me bonkers that it wasn't.
Mostly I remember the sheer, tear-inducing frustration that crept into my stomach at the fact that I did not possess the necessary skills required to make my parents understand what it was I was trying to say. I was trying to explain something I didn't know a word for with words I did know but that couldn't accurately describe what my problem was. Even now, as an adult, I have no idea how I would describe sugar dissolving without actually using the word 'dissolving'.
I don't remember how the matter was sorted out and I'm pretty certain I didn't learn the word 'dissolve' that day. I'm not sure my parents ever really understood what I was trying to tell them, a fact that bothered me because I didn't like this feeling of helplessness, that I couldn't make myself understood.
From that day on I've devoured words like a crazy cat lady on an episode of 'Hoarders'. I want words for everything. I want everything to be called something. When I find something that has no name and I feel needs one, I make one up. I think we take it for granted that we can get our ideas across to others in a satisfactory manner. I've never talked to anyone else about this particular memory, but I'm not sure many people have had--or at least remember having--an experience in which they were rendered helpless to explain something by not knowing the proper words to describe it. I do remember, and I never wanted to feel like that again.
So I decided to start learning the names and words for everything.
And I did.
And I still am.
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