Words

I’m not the kind of creative person that can invent a story. Even playing “two truths and a lie” requires some mental preparation. Inventing a recipe would stress me, and why bother, when the world is full of recipes already? I’m especially uninterested in reading lists of words-that-don’t-exist-but-should. I’ll tell you why…

The other day I was listening to John Le Carré’s memoir titled The Pigeon Tunnel. He reads with a sonorous voice, has an English accent, but also reads in the other languages he speaks: German, French and American. I might not catch the all the references but I’ve enjoyed listening. Perhaps because he loves writing: “I love doing what I’m doing at this moment, scribbling away like a man in hiding at a pokey desk, on a black-clouded early morning in May, with the mountain rain scuttling down the window and no excuse for tramping down to the railway station under an umbrella because the international New York Times doesn’t arrive till lunchtime.” So I listen with the kind of satisfaction one has for a well-prepared meal. I listen to the words he uses, like “exophthalmic” for a description of eyes.

I looked it up. It is an adjective to describe those eyes that protrude, and how many times have I not noticed people with such eyes, or heard my mother describe such a look. My mother always had a knack for describing people. She could mimic something of them until you understood who she was talking about, or had at least, a caricature in mind. She once described a nun with a toothy smile as a person with teeth like piano keys. But those eyes? There’s a word for them! It is a serious word that John Le Carré can deliver with effortless pronunciation, as if, my goodness, these exophthalmic-eyed people were just as common as the elderly rheumy-eyed ones.

We don’t need to invent new words! They exist already… it’s just a matter of reading to discover them.