They are not the regular words of the everyday.
I like the everyday - the everyday fascinates me. There is a beauty in the mundane rituals of daily life, rarely pondered as the world bounds and weaves around us. The mundane is so hard to write about because it flows beneath our conscious, taken-for-granted as we ponder the larger questions.
But the answers to these questions, I would suggest, are perhaps hidden in that which goes noticed on our quest toward enlightenment. We use big, pretty, and smart sounding words to make these larger concepts and questions describable - dichotomous, irreverent, indoctrinated, effervescent, finesse, supposition, aforementioned, entwined. But these words make little sense without the little words between them. The ones that we don't say, "ohh what a pretty word" to, the ones that seem to serve the purpose of merely being connectors to greater things. The highway between Canberra and Sydney. An inconvenient part of the journey.
They are words of utility, ones that work tirelessly to show the beauty in other words. I think that is an admirably quality for anything. But, like the everyday, they go unnoticed as they paint a bigger picture.
There is beauty in these smaller and more regular words, a beauty that can only come from their understatedness.
So next time someone asks you about words that you like, think not about the words that you have sex with once in a while because they are drop dead gorgeous and you want to feel pretty and smug, and like a little bit of a wanker.
Think of the words that support you when times get tough. The ones that are always there for you to fall back on or prop you up. The words that you do not forget, or have to look up definitions for, the words that you know in and out and are an unnoticed joy to use.
These are the words in which true beauty lies.
"When words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain"
William Shakespeare
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