The English language is a beautiful and frightening thing. A few years ago the people who worry about this sort of fact noted that we now have passed the 1 million word mark. Words we understand are a smaller subset of that; if English is your first language, you probably comprehend anywhere from 20,000 to 100,000 words. What we USE, however, is an even smaller subset of those, around 10%.
My articulate and educated husband, who also happens to have a penchant for letting you know when a word isn't used exactly properly, may have an active vocabulary of around 20,000 words, which is a lot. Children learning to speak their native language double their word bank every few months, a pace we can't possibly match as adults. The more education you have, generally the greater your range, although the most verbally poetic and expressive man I know has no formal education beyond high school - a lifetime of reading has given him word wings. Words - beautiful, specific, descriptive, long, short, pithy, and vague - are everywhere. And yet sometimes they fail me utterly.
Why is there no word for the tangle of sensations when the first fall leaves skitter across the sidewalk, and the not-as-early sunlight slants into the still vibrant begonias, while the scent of cool nights lingers on my damp newspaper?
Or the feeling when, while lingering over coffee after dinner out, when the perfect equilibrium between temperature and sweetness has finally been achieved, the solicitous waiter tops me off, and, although happy for the more, I rue that I will now have to start again?
Maybe someone else knows the word for the heart pounding anxiety, tinged with pride in her and wistfulness for the safety of her cradle, that comes each time I take my teen out to practice her new driving skills.
The ruthless sneakiness of memory is a minefield of lexical pitfalls. When I am uneasy that there is something I have forgotten, but even the shadow of what it might be lies in the unplumbed corner of my mind, there are no ways to express the almost anxiety. I need a word to sum up the rush of associations and memories that a single scent can summon, and then to describe how it is just as quickly gone, and left me with no ability to describe the whiff. Why, for that matter, is it so hard to describe a smell? We have to associate it WITH something else; as though there are no intrinsic aromas, simply those like or contrary to others.
This disappointment in the language is brought on, I think, by the elegance of this season change. I am almost ready to relinquish air-conditioning, sanguine about pulling out the sweaters and leggings, anticipating my peasant cooking style of cold weather months, but still nostalgic for the wavy heat of Mid-West summer. Like so many things, the passage to fall is both so gradual as to be almost unnoticed, and yet also instant; imprisoning it in expression is like putting lightning in a jar.
And if anyone can find the word to capture the feeling of time both firebolting past me and holding me wrapped in a perfect interval, where past present and future are all in this day, then teach it to me. Until then, I will bumble through the unutterable beauty of these moments, committing to sly memory the nuances and sharp corners, holding tight to all that is just out of my reach.
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