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On Glasses and GLASSES

iffershortt

Yesterday, I deliberated about deliberating.

Then today, I decided to deliberate. After a longer swim than intended, because I lost count while pre-deliberating, I resolved the issue. Like Ace, my main character in Glasses: Book 1 of the Ace and Monroe Trilogy, I take delight in words. I wonder about their first usages and mutations, why some words seem more popular than their equally good siblings, and how a favorite for months on end one day is suddenly rejected without a thought. It vanishes from the mind, and so from use. The void must be filled, and another word generally takes its place. Words and phrases wait patiently for their time in the forefront of one’s brain.

 

In Glasses, Ace’s favorite word for a while is terrifically. She loves the sound and implication of it until the time comes when she no longer does. Though she did not wake up on, say, a Monday morning, and realize while brushing her teeth that she wanted to stop highlighting one of her chosen, she ditched terrifically for humongous [probable first notation in 1964]. Humongous had a short life in her spotlight, its favorite status shorter-lived than any pet word that preceded it.

 

Why? I find humongous a yummy word, more fun, certainly, than terrifically. Ace, however, does not. Also, I ask were these words truly gone without a thought? I thought I should know, but I didn’t. I did not deliberate beyond the idea that maybe someone took them, in much the same was as one might steal an idea … hmm.

 

That was it, of course. Someone took the words and started using them as liberally as Ace did, so she didn’t want them anymore. Words can travel so fast that they very quickly become fads, what today we might call a meme. Ace’s reaction to the widespread use of her favorite words was indignation. “Everyone seems to be saying my word, so it is now dead to me!”

 

In truth, everybody wasn’t saying it. Terrifically, for example, is an ordinary word that people use on occasion, though less often than its adjective form terrific. Humongous did have appeal but was not an overnight sensation. Yet, for Ace it was truly significant. I didn’t fully realize when I gave her a life in Glasses that Ace was a lot like me at her age. She wanted to claim ownership of her fetishes. She thought of them as self-expression; she was not trying to create a fad, anything but. There were plenty of fad words to share--groovy, far-out, bitchen, bummer, grok--and share them she did. Her personal favorites she wanted to be hers, as I pointed out. These were words that could be clues to her inner self. 

 

My little deliberation led me to this: words are for some of us the equivalent of excelling at a sport or musical instrument, painting on canvas or preparing a gourmet plated dinner for eight. Mainstream words, such as terrific, can serve nicely as favorites and should not be snubbed for being utilitarian. Fad words often enter into the vernacular, but one can get good use from them before they are fully absorbed. Favorite foods, favorite clothes, favorite friends … they can and do change overnight.

 

I recently passed a tall, pretty twenty-something wearing glasses. Large squares they were, in bold iridescent purple frames. I might not have noticed the woman were she without those dramatic specs. They attracted me as much as would an exotic animal running loose on the pavement beside me. I realized, appraising her, that she was not in fact pretty. She was willowy, yes, but her facial features were not distinct in any way. Yet, she is still in my mental album. What those glasses communicated created in me an interest in what lay behind them. Although that curiosity was not satisfied, it was terrific because of the humongous size and color of the glasses she wore.

 

Glasses and words. Clues to what lies behind and within. Today, Ace’s favorite word is favorite. It may be mine, as well. 

~

 

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