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I am reading @nkjemisin ’s spectacular “The City We Became” and this sentence stopped me: “Don’t sleep on the city that never sleeps, son and don’t bring your squamous, eldritch bullshit here”.
Eldritch? Squamous, sure; scaly. Also skin cells, like cancer. But eldritch?
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Eldritch? Squamous, sure; scaly. Also skin cells, like cancer. But eldritch?
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Suddenly, I’m 8 again. Tired of my continuous questions about the meaning of words, my parents show me the dictionary, teach me how to use it. I’m now full of words: ventricle, ennui, obstreperous.
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Some of them I pronounce incorrectly. When I’m 10, I have en-NEW-we all over the house. I call my brother names that sound like hideous insults: troglodyte. Gargoyle. Corpuscle.
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But I discover something: words have power. In sentences, in paragraphs, words have *exponential* power. I never knew this as viscerally as I did when I was ten, even after years of writing and arguing at Courts of Appeal. At ten, I could do anything with words.
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In the last few years, I have read for pleasure at a glacial pace while not at work. A book or two a month, at most. As a young teenager, a book a day was the standard. Fiction became an escape for vacations. @nkjemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy was a companion last year.
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Any little bit of joy that we can celebrate right now, should be. So I celebrate the feeling of reading the word “eldritch” and not knowing what it means, of having no-chill ten year old me standing over my shoulder, reaching for the dictionary, a surprise ‘oh, hello, you’.
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Eldritch (adj.): weird and sinister or ghostly
A new word. One in a great sea of words I don’t know, multiplied a thousand times because of languages I will never learn.
Thank you, @nkjemisin
A new word. One in a great sea of words I don’t know, multiplied a thousand times because of languages I will never learn.
Thank you, @nkjemisin
