Word things – another casualty of 2020

I don’t remember not loving words.

I could read and write before I entered school. Granted, it was pretty rudimentary stuff – because, y’know, I’m clever, but I’m not that level brilliant – but still, once you have bat down pat cat, fat and sat aren’t much of a stretch. (See what I did there? Just a wee, little crack-me-up.)

I don’t remember it, but I figure my parents must’ve read to me a lot when I was a kid. I do remember asking my dad to spell things for me or tell me what something meant, and he did, constantly, until he didn’t want to anymore, so then I remember him teaching me how to look things up in a dictionary.

We had a doozy of a dictionary, and a set of encyclopedias, too.

I imagine some door-to-door salesman stopping by my parents first apartment, sweating in his polyester suit and tie and telling them that any young parents who wanted to be good parents – no, great parents! – would give their kids a leg up with a quality set of home reference materials. Why, these leather-bound books would last a lifetime of use, and the information was so advanced, even their grandchildren would be using them to get straight A’s in medical school.

I’ll give the salesman this, the 6-inch thick tome of a dictionary held up through much use in my childhood and still holds a place of honor, in my own home now. Despite my access to the internet-of-all-things, I still pull the dictionary out on occasion to feel the weight of the words in my hands and hear the delicate rustle of its thin pages. It’s no stretch from there to remember grade-school-me plunking this dictionary down on the floor and sounding a word as I traced a finger down the page to find the one I was looking for.

Even now, when I write, or think about writing, or think about something I talk about in the future, I hear the words in my head. It’s probably the slowest way to formulate communication, but I love the sound of words.

I love that we have a word, onomatopoeia, that sounds like nothing – “on-uh-mahduh-pee-uh,” unitelligible – but it means the formation of a word that sounds like the thing it describes. Sizzle, tap, rumble, squeak, meow. Isn’t that fun?

I love how the sound of words can help us feel the action and emotion.

Compare this: She slammed the pickup into gear and ripped across the yard to the driveway. Her tires spit gravel all the way to the highway where she skittered sideways onto the blacktop on her way to anywhere but back home.

To this: With her headlights on high beam, the miles of yellow and white lines spun a trail through a dark night that closed in behind her like a wall of black that stretched wider by the mile between herself and home.

One reads fast, one reads slow, just like the action in the story, and this matches the mood. It’s the words, man – how cool is that?

I love the way some words travel through your brain and feel in your mouth. Pandemonium, accouterments, circumnavigate, exfoliate, luminescent, insubordinate, cogizen … wait, no, cogizant … no. Coginz—

“Cognizant,” my co-worker said helpfully, when I was literally having this problem. I just wanted to snap back, “I know. Shut up.”

“Cog. Ni. Zant,” I said instead – like I was trying to hook myself on some phonics – just to make my brain connect to my mouth.

It occurred to me right then that I have a problem, friends. As this year has progressed, with me working mostly out of my home office and staying away from people, my conversation skills have slowly eroded. It’s like the wiring that directly connects my brain to my mouth is corroded from disuse.

It started with sentences that sound like, as if I one thing — I start to say — I start a sentence one way, want to, with the words change things, in the sentence stuff several times before the, by the end.

I’m fine on paper, but I open my mouth and it’s a speaker’s autocorrect nightmare.

2020 has taken so much, now it’s taking my words, too? The first love of my life?

The first step to fixing a problem is admitting you have one. Now I’m going to go talk to my cat about it.

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I won’t succumb to your treachery 2020 at [email protected].