One Hundred Names for Love by Diane Ackerman

One Hundred Names for Love by Diane Ackerman

Author:Diane Ackerman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2011-02-06T16:00:00+00:00


CHAPTER 17

IN THE CUBBYHOLES OF A LIBRARY CLOSET, I STORED YARN, gift wrap, and all sorts of presents (from the nifty to the impossibly hedonistic) for friends and relations, gathered on my travels or whenever I happened upon something just right for someone. Then, when birthday or Christmas arrived, I had a perfect little gift. Whenever I entered the closet now, my eyes fell on language tokens squirreled away for Paul. What should I do with the book of palindromes, for instance? Madam, in Eden, I’m Adam. Rats live on no evil star. Do geese see God? He would have loved those. Or the mug from the Folger Library with Shakespearean insults written all over it? You egg, you fry of treachery. Or the literary guides to European cities? Such presents would seem cruel.

Once we lived in a house made of words. Our personal vocabulary had ranged from the word flaff, which meant utter nonsense, to mrok, a plaintive cry often uttered by one of us hoping to locate the other. Just as some couples mainly relate through their children, we had related through our rowdy family of words. We wallowed in codes and idiomatic privacies.

On one signal occasion, carrying an untidy armload of mail and magazines from the mailbox, I announced my arrival—for no special reason; it just swam into my head—by singing out “Post trout!”

“Post trout!” Paul had echoed playfully from his study down the hall. He soon emerged grinning.

“Is this my post trout?” he’d asked of me, glad of a new pet name, and planted a fish-mouthed kiss on my forehead. From then on, trout functioned as postmen and carriers of all desirable commodities.

Depending on what you are carrying, you can be the Coffee Trout, the Bagel Trout, and so on, not that trout are known for their carrying capacity or even for their ability to reduce the portion of daily inconvenience. . . . [Nonetheless, trout serve as] the epitome-personification of the helpful other. . . . I don’t see how a civilized household that cherishes intimacy can function without these playful oddities, which firm the bond and widen the spectrum of sounds, though what a stranger would make of the little chiming Babel . . . I have no idea.

—Life with Swan

Every word that bended easily we warped in playful ways. Weekdays became: Mondalsday, Tueselday, Wendelsday, Thurselday, Fridalday, Egg Day (when I fried up eggs for him), and Sundalsday. Hand became handle, and breakfast breaklefast, mouthwash mousewash, lens lensness. Self shelbst, sleep schluffy, and the Johnny Carson show Carsonienses. A visit to the dermatologist became a “mole patrol.” “Are you a cyclamen?” meant “Are you feeling ill?” (etymology: “sicklamin” = diminutive of sick, which, sounding like the flower “cyclamen,” suggests a small flower-like sick person). One especially fond reference we abbreviated to A.C.H.M., often written Achmed, commemorating the tiniest mouse we had ever seen, in a botanical garden in St. Louis: A Certain Harvest Mouse. “Our intimate bestiary,” Paul wrote, “gave us a private world as secret as that of Cockney rhyming slang.



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