Words to Leave By

As you’ve probably figured out, I care about words. When I write, I aim to deliver precision and clarity, with just a soupçon of surprise and delight. And that’s because I want you to read my work with the same attention to detail. We’re in this together, folks! Still, there are certain words and phrases I tend to overuse; I’m always trying to be aware of those, and reduce their frequency. (Let me know if you spot any tics!) Meanwhile, there are other odds and ends of language that I’ve successfully managed to strike from my usage, and I wanted to point them out today because I believe their absence makes writing—all writing, not just mine—stronger in general.

The Perfect Word Does Not Exi—

Just about everywhere I’ve ever worked as an editor, I’ve banned the word perfect. It’s the laziest of lazy choices—a bland way for journalists to signal that something is, like, really, really good. Start looking for it in your daily media diet, and you’ll spot it constantly: the perfect gin and tonic, cookies that are perfect for sharing, perfect gifts, perfect matches, perfect days. It’s a word you reach for when you don’t actually want to reach very far at all. I object to it not only because the idea of “perfection” is an impossibility—could that gin and tonic really be without flaws?—but because that very concept is boring: Flawnessless is bland. Yes, it can be impressive, but perfection feels inhuman—the perfect does not need us, does not interact with us. In the face of the perfect, we are expected merely to gape. Thing is, a gape ain’t far off from a yawn.

Me, I prefer the challenges of imperfection. The flawed phenomenon is the one that needs our appreciation; our attention, our participation brings it to life. We must think carefully about what we desire from an object or an experience, and how or whether this particular one measures up. And when it does, the word I choose to praise it is not perfect but ideal. Maybe I’m splitting hairs here, but to me the latter conveys so much more intention: that we have considered what something is versus what something could be, and have decided that the gap between those states of being has grown so infinitesimally small that it might as well not exist. This is the ideal. And yet because the word and the concept carry all that ancient philosophical weight, we also always still recognize that that gap does exist, that the ideal is about aspiration. In language as in life, we may never catch our shadow, but we can certainly keep trying.

All Puns Intended

I love puns, the bad along with the good. But few things bother me more in a piece of writing than when I encounter the phrases pun intended and no pun intended. Ideally, both should be unnecessary. If the pun was intended, we should recognize it without needing it pointed out. For a pun to be unintended makes even less sense: By calling attention to its presence, however initially accidental, and leaving it in the sentence, has the writer not made it intentional?

Both of these approaches are lazy, and speak to a dire lack of editing in the workaday world of journalism. Everything we write should be intended! That’s why we’re writing in the first place—to intentionally convey to you stories, ideas, and information. Accidents and inspiration may happen along the way, but as writers we need to be aware of them as they occur, and shape them to our purposes.

This is not to say there can be no unintended meanings. Alternate interpretations have a way of creeping into all prose, even that which is well edited, and there’s ultimately no avoiding it. We cannot control everything, audience reaction least of all. As a journalist, I quickly learned that people read the story they want to read, not necessarily the story I wrote. As a devotee of Roland Barthes, I’m pretty conflicted about this: I understand that the text lies beyond my control, and interpretation rests with the reader, but come on, this author isn’t dead yet! I’m not about to throw my hands up in defeat—I’m still going to do what I can to close that gap between intention and reception until it’s infinitesimally tiny. Cuz you gotta have ideals, man.

I Never Metaphor I Truly Liked

I love metaphors—but I mistrust them. In writing, I may be trying to get you to visualize a scene, or understand a character or an idea, and to deploy a metaphor in those situations feels to me like a failure, an acknowledgment that my vocabulary is lacking. Which it shouldn’t be! The English language is so vast and so flexible; its supply of precise and colorful terms is nearly infinite. It’s like, I don’t know, a well that never runs dry?

Never mind how clichéd that simile is—who among us has even used a well in recent years, or worried that it might go dry? We can surely imagine that well, and the possibility of its arid fate, but it’s an unnecessary abstraction. Even though we recognize its intention, on a very basic level it takes us away from the subject at hand, and into a realm of subjectivity: Is your experience of my metaphor the same as mine? Are you buying what I’m selling?

Maybe metaphors bother me in particular because what I’m selling tends to be pretty abstract already. As I plumb the depths of my own mind, I don’t want to deploy language and imagery that could, in their attempts to clarify via comparison, make things murkier than they already are. For you to see clearly, I need to as well. And so maybe this is also a way to measure how confident I am in what I’m telling you in these essays: If or when I do go all metaphorical on your asses, it means I know exactly—wait, is it exactly or precisely? I always get confused by those two—what the hell I’m talking about. 🪨🪨🪨

It’s Good and I Like It: Jane’s Krazy Mixed-Up Salt

Salt is good. Flavored salt is gooder. We have a lovely uni salt we brought back from Japan, and I have friends who’ve made porcini salt (from leftover dried-porcini dust) and flower-and-herb salts. But the Ur flavored sodium product in my life is Jane’s Krazy Mixed-Up Salt, which was invented in the 1960s by an energetic Pennsylvania woman named Jane Semans. We always had it in the house when I was a kid, and it just makes everything better. I’m not the kind to break down every specific flavor component in a product, but let’s just say there’s dried onion and garlic in there, and a decent balance of Italianate herbs—i.e., things you eat that improve other things you eat. Buy it, use it, and spread the word.

Read Yesterday’s Attempt