Confessions of a Lurid Logophile

Logophilia is a serious affliction, although its passions are easily satisfied. Words, after all, are ubiquitous.

Hence the logophile slithers in stealth through towns leaving townsfolk heedless of his urge to slurp their word straight from their street signs and bill boards. He’s got to! He’s a rain-coated, portal dwelling, window glaring logophile! Any message. Any language. Gimme, gimme!

Why there are people who love words straight up, without them being applied in a sentence, nobody knows. Saying you’re a logophile is like saying that you love musical notes, or bricks, or little squeezed out paint tubes, while ‘normal’ people like symphonies, architecture and paintings. But I am one, and I’m coming out. No more hiding. I’m going to tell the world why I love words.

To me words are little animals with their own little body and soul. Even when they’re not in some natural habitat such as a sentence or a dictionary, they are alive and have personality. Some words are as common as sparrows or grass, but other words are rare and when I see them I study the whole paragraph to see where they live and what they’re up to.

I positively thrills me to see a word that I haven’t seen before. Of many words I remember where I heard or read them first. Some words I’ve only read and never heard pronounced and I wonder how to say them. Some words are funny every time I see them. Take the word ‘buses’ for instance. To me that looks like the plural of ‘buse,’ and whenever I see it, I have to chant it: buse, buse, buse.

Some words are little sculptures with their own tiny structure. Words like ‘bob’ or ‘pip’ for instance, are delightful palindromic sprinkles that work excellently in sentences that are supposed to be funny. A word like ‘trinket,’ is a cute butterfly with i-wings. It works wonderfully in sentences that are meant to be staccato, for whatever reason. Words with z’s are zip-words. K-words are abrupt and sometimes a bit harsh on the pallet. W-words are soft and fuzzy. S-words should be avoided when it rains.

Some words are a lot of fun simply because they’re impossibly long, and you have to practice saying them before you can dazzle someone with them. I love the words rambunctious, facetious and bodacious for that reason, although the –ous part marks a special word-genre that usually indicates that the speaker doesn’t know what to say next and is only saying that word to buy some time.

Some words are fun because they’re constructed specifically for that reason. A word like discombobulated, for instance, is a made-up word without any clear etymology. But it’s fun to say, although you can only say it about once a year, or else you’re silly. I wonder where it came from, though. I’m guessing that it is rooted in an event in which someone purloined an item that rightfully belonged to a communications officer named Robert.

As odd as it may seem, some folks (including me) see colors in words. It’s a condition called synesthesia (a.k.a synaesthesia) and it’s a delight. To me, words that feature a royal helping of the letter ‘a’ seem red and warm. Double ‘e’- and ‘i’-words are cooler and bluish and sometimes yellow and pale. Z-words are grey. Words that start with a ‘q’ evoke in me the same kind of feeling as do those little wobbly caramel puddings. Any ‘x’ gives me the taste of chocolate chips on vanilla ice cream. Subsequent diphthongs, especially French ones, will top them off with a shot of cherry goo.

And because items are named different in different languages, my personality and world-perception changes when I switch between languages. To me, relationships in English are much more romantic than relationships in Dutch. But relationships in Dutch are much more practical. In fact, when I’m out engineering (I’m a maritime engineer) I speak either perfect Dutch, or English involuntarily with an accent like a log. But when I’m out composing poetry or high prose or otherwise pretending I’m some kind of academic, I speak English fluently with hardly a hint of Nether-Germanic contamination.

For some reason I always get furiously indignant at some point during a conversation in German. Excursions in any of the Slavic languages lead invariably to slurred redundancies. I’ve never had a Hebrew relationship, but once I tried to explain myself in Latin and got promptly send to the principle.

Discombobulative barbarians!