An Early Experience With Language
Like I’ve noted before, I’m trying to work more on how I employ and deploy words. I’m trying to bring each sentence up to a deliberately amazing level.
I want to be a word-ninja, and to do that I must meditate on every word. I must arrange the words as grains of rice, scrawled upon in unseen hand and seasoned with just the right amounts of sugar and vinegar.
This means poetry.
The first exercise I’ve decided to jot down is one where I ramble about an early experience with language. I’m game, I suppose, lovely little poetry-writing book.
The experience I want to discuss is when and how I first learned the word “fuck.”
I know, inelegant, right? Yet that’s why I am compelled to talk about it. I learned it first in Canada, from a cousin of mine who knew much more about the world much faster. I was about four, and so I suppose he must have by then been five.
He said it, and something in the saying of it told me this was a word to be said in dark corners, a word of heft and significance.
Needless to say I was immediately taken with it. How it flowed out the mouth at first, but then at the end delivered a potent kick. Without that kick, one might almost seem to be saying something nice. But then came the “ck,” and you were slapped in the face with something that even a four year old knew was intense.
Of course, all I could tell was the power of the word, not its meaning or context. So I remember, on our return from Canada, jumping on my parents’ bed and screaming this word despite their attempts to get me to stop. Why? Because it gave me some kind of importance. Suddenly I could use a piece of language that could draw people’s attention in a fashion that wasn’t the patronizing oh-look-what-the-kid-said way.
Now, I grew out of it, and grew back into it, in time. But the lesson stayed with me; certain words have power, by the very virtue of their structure. Certain words mean something, even when you do not know what they mean.
And to use words, is to wield their power. Handle a word as you might handle a gun, and do not pick one up unless you fully intend to use it.
