Words

Are these words working, do they work for you?

Damn I love words. Words are the cleverest thing humans have ever thought up. Like, science and maths and all that are pretty clever, but how in the heck do you explain your complicated new theory about fire to the other Homo sapiens if you don’t have some way to codify ideas into vocally expressed thoughts? With stick drawings in the dirt? I don’t think so.

Ta da!

I get unreasonably excited about words. Today, while watching The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, Jane said “loquacious”. I love “loquacious”. I had to stop the video to clap my hands like a kid. Number 1 best ever use of “loquacious” was by Hermione J. Granger in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (movie). It was the best ever because the joke in itself is funny: that Victor Krum is a bit handsy, but it’s even funnier because it’s Hermione, and she didn’t say “handsy” she said, “Victor is not particularly loquacious”.

Words make us laugh, but they also wound. You can stab someone, shoot them, throw a rock at their head, and hurt them, kill them, instantly. But words take time. They can twist and fester and pull right at the gut of a person. Even a cutting, scathing remark that hurts upon hearing will worsen with time, biting deeper and deeper. Words start wars, words end lives; words change us.

Even though words, at their worst, are brutal things, I still love them. I love them for their flexibility, for their changeability and for their ambiguity. I love that you can make people groan with a pun and snort into their tea with a particularly crude phrase. I love that you can put a lot of them together in a certain way and tell a story; that you can conjure them up out of thin air to make fiction.

Mostly I love that words belong to people. Words change, language changes, and there’s nothing you can really do about it. With words, in my firm opinion, majority rules. If enough people start pluralising the word “you” to form “yous” or perhaps, “youse”, then it’ll be a word. Lots of other languages have a plural, but in English; particularly Australian English “youse” is associated with lower class or uneducated speech. Well listen up, non-bogans, if the bogans get that word to spread enough, someone will put it in the dictionary, and we’ll be stuck with it. There’s a beautiful irony when people say “you can’t just make up words!” because that’s all words ever are, made up sounds that some motherfucker (probably Shakespeare) has decided mean something.

Don’t get me wrong. I like correct spelling and grammar. I’m not saying you can just write whatever you like and hope for the best. But the main reason I like it is not because it’s good and proper, but because English is so convoluted; there’s so many glorious ways you can say something, that you’re bound to be misunderstood if you don’t get it right. So you’ve got to get it right. Commas and apostrophes, they mean stuff. Without them, you start to turn words into letters again. Just boring old letters. You need all the other little dottie bits to keep those letters together, keep them as fantastic, beautiful, clever words.

I wonder why I’m talking coz I’m talking all the time. We won’t forget the message and just leave it all behind. The conversation’s trivial but trivial is fine when held up to the light. - Words, Kate Miller-Heidke.

Make. Believe.

When I was a kid, I loved ‘imagination games’. These were games predominantly in my head, and involved making up a story to act out. I particularly liked pretending to be a lioness, usually making a daring escape from a mean zookeeper with my lion cubs, who were played by teddies. I also liked to make up adventures in fictional, fantastical or historical places. Or sometimes I would use a book or movie to form the basis of an imagination game and would act out a story that could fit in that world. I know lots of kids play ‘pretend’, but sometimes I wouldn’t even act that much of the game out, I would just let it happen in my head.

I had a friend in primary school who was also into imagination games.  The two of us regularly ran a day care centre for imaginary children, or a shop, or other businesses. We had a purse full of coins from her mum and we pretended that 1c was a dollar, 10c = $10 etc., so if we ever found 5 or 10 dollars, for instance, we would be stinking rich and would take a pretend holiday. Sometimes our games were quite dramatic, I remember one in which I was her blind sister and we were trying to pay for my surgery. We never discussed it, but we only ever played these games when it was just the two of us. When we were with other girls, we played at make up and talked about boys and listened to music and pretended to be grown up. Which is sad, in a way, because we were only about 11. I also remember thinking around this time that I should grow out of playing pretend games, but I never really did.

When I was a teenager, I often used them to help me do things I didn’t want to. Bringing in the washing became harvesting fruit, I would pretend that jobs or homework I had to do were part of a race against the clock type gameshow. I remember spending school holidays when I was home alone, pretending that my life was something else. Not because I didn’t like my life, but because hey, I could be eating 2 minute noodles in the backyard OR I could be eating an authentic Japanese noodle dish in the Emperor’s private garden, awaiting his approval of my new kimono.

As an adult, I definitely don’t play games in my head as often as I used to. It’s sort of as if the kid in me has forgotten how. Or maybe that she’s just asleep, because sometimes I still do. She must wake up every now and again because sometimes I’m not walking down the street; I’m a trained assassin, following my next target. I’m not ironing my clothes, I’m ironing the Lady’s clothes, and if I don’t have all the creases pressed out she won’t look perfect at the ball tomorrow and it will bring disgrace on the house.

Actually, I’m very often living out Downton Abbey fantasies… I play them at work sometimes, when I’m setting up for a conference. All the chairs have to face a certain way, and I like to lay the tea cups out perfectly symmetrically, and all the while I’m not Lizzy, I’m Anna and I’m not setting them out for a client, I’m setting them out for the Crawleys.

I’m not sure if anyone else does this sort of thing, but I suspect it is one of the reasons I like writing stories so much. Do you still play pretend? Tell me all about it.