My second obsession after travel is with language, especially words as codes for jargon I don’t always understand & find often deliberately constructed for exclusion, or grammatical rules that stunt the ways we express ourselves by breaking our rhythms into staccato clips all held in and prevented from flowing one thought into the next
meanwhile words from other mother tongues give meanings that don’t always translate directly into my own first language of English yet can summon a whole intensity of emotions, for example the sublime paracosm – from the Greek para (beside) and kosmos (world) – meaning a detailed imaginary world created by an individual – that many of us are blessed in being able to conjure, at least as children.
all this is to say that I’m currently enjoying a new phase of lavishly long sentences for the pleasure of writing without the strait jacket of continual punctuation. I’d recommend it – oh and learning to swear in other languages is very satisfying too
(by the way if you are curious about the image accompanying this vignette (another word I love deeply) it’s of a bottle of water I bought in Mali, labeled Tombouctou. this is the Malian spelling for Timbuktu the legendary oasis itself named after desert dweller B’ctou, loyal woman guardian of the local life-giving well)
