Word.

I often worry that I am too slow a conversationalist. While other people seem to be able to thwack dialogue back and forth at a jolly rapid pace, I often need to ruminate before saying something worth saying. I’ve been told I talk slowly (this made me paranoid for a week or two that people saw me as some kind of Gump girl). I’ve been criticised, by people who love me, for pausing in midsentence and breaking up my speech with spam (like like like like like) because I haven’t finished translating my thoughts into words.

I know I can be annoying to listen to. I wish I was quicker. Our society values a quick wit, or, at least, what it perceives as one. Fast talkers are seen as confident, smart, charming, knowledgeable. Fast talkers can make you laugh. They’re persuasive –you become synched to the rhythm of their speech and you find yourself nodding almost involuntarily. But how closely are you actually listening to what they say? How carefully do they choose their words? I fear that the faster a person talks, the easier it is for them to lapse into auto-speak. This is a bastard form of communication. I got something to say; I wanna say it fast; my mind whips around snatching up common phrases and pegging them together. As George Orwell might have put it, it’s pre-fab. We don’t like to take the time to consider the meaning, or meanings, of our words (unless they sounded dirty, of course). We want to be heard, and we’ve only got a moment on the air before someone else decides it’s their turn and cuts in. Gotta say it fast. And this comes at the expense of true clarity.

How many times a day do you profess your love or hate? What’s the last thing you said you hated? No, seriously, please write in. And tell me, how much do you really hate that thing (on a scale of HEAPS to NOT MUCH AT ALL ACTUALLY)? Why did you use the word hate? It’s a very strong word. Hatred is bitterly ugly. It speaks of a history of damage and spite. Is that honestly how you feel about broccoli? Giggles aside, no. It’s not. You’re exaggerating on a massive scale. You use love just as indiscriminately. You love this song. You love that dress. You love tequila. It would be exquisite, overwhelming, terrifying to feel so strongly about so much.

We used to know the proper meanings of words. We used to understand what other people meant when they used those words. But black and white got boring and we started to embellish, little by little. In description, the stronger word had a stronger impact; therefore, we neglected the truly appropriate word. Where something was good, we called it great. Where something was great, we called it fantastic. Suddenly everything was super, amazing, incredible, astounding, magnificent, awesome. Things went from big to huge to massive to vast to epic. Awesome and epic were once a pair of grand, sweeping, majestic words. They have both been neutered by adolescent overuse. Now what do they mean? Cool.

It’s gonna be pretty awesome.

Yeah man. Epic.

And, of course, we have completely lost the ability to define the badness of things. Oh, you hated the movie? Why’s that? It was gay. The acting’s shit. The plot was lame. The whole thing was totally retarded. We can’t stop swearing because it seems like the only way to get across our intense malcontent, but swearwords have lost all their potency because now they’re every-fucking-where.

It’s all just etymological sex and violence. Used to be a shock to see a lady’s knees or hear a nice young lad say ‘damn!’ They didn’t need to show any blood to chill our bones in Psycho. But once they’d dumped one bucket of blood on Sissy Spacek, they had to use two buckets next time, and more and more and more and if you show a kid Psycho today he shrugs and deems it ‘lame.’

There is a school of thought that words are given meaning by their usage; that we change language according to our needs. Well, indeed. We give words new meanings all the time. We needed a word to describe the female naughty place that wasn’t so awkwardly clinical, and we chose the adorable pussy. Already had a meaning; now it’s got two, lucky thing. Then we needed a word for describing sad-sack males who are weak and fraidy, and we thought, what about pussy again? Charming. Now this word has become a general-purpose insult which saves us the trouble of individually identifying our bar pick-ups and the guys we don’t like.

There are thousands of words in the English language, and only one of them is shit. Why have we no interest in tilling over these masses of words and finding exactly the right one that means exactly what we mean? Is the day so short that we can’t take a moment to genuinely articulate a thought, or to listen to another person sharing his own words rather than a string of borrowed phrases? Or even to admire the skill involved in constructing a complex insult.
Quoth Blackadder (the first): ‘You ride a horse rather less well than another horse would.’ What a marvellous piece of abuse!
The next time you feel the fat flap of muscle in your mouth poised to declare that something is crap, hold still for a moment and ask yourself what it really is. Because crap is actually stinky doo-doo. Or some kind of casino game, I think. Use your words. Use them properly.