Big Words

Big words still make me feel like I have sneaked into a club that I am not a member of, that at any moment I will be found out and my intelligence tested to a backdrop of a countdown style show or a Gestapo lit scrabble tournament.

I have many books on style as well as the usual thesauruses and dictionaries.
I study phonetics, grammar, structure and even artist flare.
I stroked the works of Shelly, Bronte, Keats, Joyce. I read Dylan Thomas.
I have beginners Latin within view on my bookshelf.

My problem is I rarely feel the need to elaborate on things. A shit is a shit in anyone’s book, whether it’s dressed in tweed or not.
Getting to the point is a simple matter of A to B. I have no desire to make the reader feel like a complete C by spelling it out for them.

It is often said that people who use profanity throughout a conversation are lacking in intelligence, or perhaps they hail from a dis-funked regional area who believe swearing is part of the heritage and history of their language.

I could have cut a long story short and called these folk lazy bastards, but where is the patronizing tone in that?

Some words of profanity are now fully accepted as compliments, or humorous shows of affection. These new rules are not restricted to a working class palette but have been adopted by those of a higher financial status yet often a lesser moral standing.
Blunt words cut deep but big words frighten us all.
A combination of the two is parliamentary my dear Watson.

Often on paper it is harder to assess a person’s background.
It becomes easier for the writer to fool their audience.
Take the bible. Written in the tones of a fire and brimstone priest, using WW1 English the story of Noah becomes a poignant warning to us all – scrap the UV, save the polar bear, recycle recycle recycle.

Written in a cockney accent it becomes a rejected scene from a Guy Richard film (no doubt starring Mad Donna) “Would you Adam and eve it? That geezer Noah built a blinking great nanny goat cos God said all the other peeps where well dodgy n needed punished innit”

Ooh I am really scared.

A writer’s command of language is their weapon, but it is a double edged sword.
It is field planted with clichés were prose becomes pose, and inner desires and dreams become soundtracks to car adverts and household goods.
Soft soft soft-ly does it. Don’t scare the viewers with true meanings now.

Like music it’s all been done before. Something old, something blue, something borrowed something new to you.
Dictionaries lying naked and dying wondering what it all means, unable to rearrange themselves into a suitable self help book.

Some words have lost there meaning, whilst other seem to be having their fifteen minutes of. I’d like to give you a fucking example now, but who hasn’t?

Language has reversed, imploding, heading backwards into the rain muffled gutter talk of Burroughs’s mind.
Nothing means everything yet everything means nothing.
Profanity and slang are the new black but Emo is so out.

Even when life presents me with crisscross mishmash jumble sale language my fear of big words has not subsided.
I think big words I do not speak them.
Silently I play with them; I let my mind tumble over their curvaceous forms, too frightened to fully enter their plumpness.

Spoken aloud they sound fake in my accent, like I’ve read ‘how to use words in a sentence that clever folk do without actually being clever’ or something.
I vision having to excuse myself at parties to flick through my pocket thesaurus to stay hidden amongst the crowds.

Big words also suggest authority, leading to a tendency for me to reply in the style of a servant or a west end musical character “right you are guvner” or “it was only pilfering your ‘onor, ma young’ ens kneds an educations so they do”.
I still don’t feel like I am allowed to be in a library un-chaperoned.

Somewhere deep inside me my ancestors also like to remind that women do not become educated, they become wives and mothers.
A woman of selfish nature who dares to enter the realms of men should be punished with the barren heart of a Shakespearean villain.

Big words feel like a sin.
In my secret use of them I carry all the guilt of a religious woman, without the comfort of faith.

In an arena of profanity I am Queen, all latex and spare tyres, shouting streamers of abuse at my opponents, buckling their knee’s with the weight of my four letter words, but like the circus elephant terrified of a mouse, my size and confidence can be reduced to a jus by a single, well pronounced, delicate word.
A big one.