I’ve been thinking a lot about words recently – OK, I’ve
been thinking even more about words than I usually do – both about how
inadequate they can be in times of grief and how carelessly people can use them.
Perhaps both come down to a failure in vocabulary, but it’s also something to
do with a lack of care and attention to detail when we express ourselves. Why
don’t we want to be more particular about how we share ourselves with the
world?
I should start all this by saying that of course I have been
guilty of this in the past and I’m not pointing any fingers here, there’s no
covert passive aggressive message aimed at anyone at all, it’s just something
that is on my mind.
On returning to work after the loss of my Dad, I’ve had to
listen to colleagues complain about what a “nightmare” it is to have had to
pick up some of my work during my absence. We won’t dwell on the insensitivity
here. Nightmare seems to me to be a strange word to describe the feeling of
having to work a bit harder than normal. If I could, in my dreams, be given
seven fiddly things to do before five o’clock and then get to go and have
coffee and a cheese scone with my Dad, I’d never consider that a nightmare. It
is not that I am saying only my suffering counts or that the nightmare is MINE
and how dare they suggest otherwise. It is more that the word doesn’t stand up –
a nightmare is something that scares you while you’re asleep before you wake up
and discover that all is well and there is no reason to be afraid. Any tough
time in life is the exact opposite – you wake up relaxed and bleary eyed for
just a second before the world and all of reality comes crashing down on you to
hurt you anew. Give me imaginary giant spiders any day.
I know this has been commented on before, the misappropriation
of language. People use the word “depressed” so casually when they just mean “sad”
or “a bit fed up” or “disappointed”. For the record, I am not currently
depressed, I am sad because my Dad died and there is a difference; it may be a
long road to travel but there is a way out for me in a way that there isn’t for
people afflicted with depression. There is an excellent Dylan Moran sketch on
the overuse of the word “awesome”, asking what word you use to describe a
majestic sunset if you’ve already labelled a bag of crisps as awesome. (He, of
course, says this much more wittily than I ever could.) We are all “starving”
and never just “hungry”. It seems at the root of this there is a process of
exaggeration going on – we never seem to misuse words to minimise what we feel.
This leads to something of the boy who cried wolf syndrome.
If a daily commute is, for example, a “total nightmare” then what do we say
when something really bad happens? You’ve already used nightmare to indicate a
bad situation and surely this new thing doesn’t compare… This is what leads to
the failure of language – it’s all our own fault, we shouldn’t be allowed nice
things, should we? There are two things to consider here. The first is why we
tend to blow up every minor mishap and frustration as if we are plagued like
Job when the chances are, life is neither any harder nor any easier than it is
for anyone else. I know we all need a good rant about a bad day once in a while
just as we all need the chance to enthuse over something lovely that happens
but we should perhaps take more care about how and when we do this. The second
is that when we talk about our day, our feelings or ourselves, isn’t it worth
using language to put those into perspective and express ourselves as honestly
and accurately as possible?
Next time you want to say you’re having a nightmare,
substitute for x. If you don’t know another word, learn some. I’ve long been
working on accuracy in my poetry – where I’d never think, ah, close enough,
that word will do – but I’m going to start working on that in my speech too.
Well, that and imagining giant spiders dropping on the head of any colleague
who wants to tell me they’re living in a nightmare.
