English never met a noun it didn’t want to adopt.

It has words for drizzle, shower, downpour, mist, mizzle (surprised?…me too) sleet and hail – which feels like overkill for something I’d happily live without – but it still leaves some fairly inconvenient holes.

English has a word for the smell of rain on dry earth, petrichor, but not for the belief that words themselves can change the world.

Tiny fail.

It has around a million words by some counts, yet there are still experiences it has to borrow from somewhere else. No English word for the particular attention of someone who wanders without a destination. No English word for the mysterious force that makes one piece of art unforgettable and another merely good. English lacks a little spook. 

Other languages get to bed with their feelings. Even ‘feelings’ is not quite right – they reach for things unseen and elemental.

 

THREE BORROWED WORDS THAT SPEAK TO THE HEART OF MY PRACTICE

Three elemental languages. Three pieces of a world I didn’t have better language for – which is, admittedly, a strange position for someone in the language business to be in.

 

言霊  Kotodama

Japanese. Roughly: “word spirit.”

The belief that words carry a force of their own – that what is said doesn’t simply describe reality but acts on it. Speak carelessly and something loosens. Speak with intention and you shape what follows.

This isn’t metaphor where it comes from. It’s closer to physics. Words travel.

Not just pretty, but load bearing. Or perhaps, a whole new entity when they travel in a group.

 

Flâneur

French. Pronounced: “flah-NUR.”

Someone who wanders with the sole purpose of noticing.

The word comes from nineteenth-century Paris – Baudelaire’s figure strolling the boulevards, paying such close attention to ordinary life that it became worth writing about.

The flâneur isn’t searching for remarkable things. The ordinary is the whole. A conversation overheard that then spins a new tale in your own head. The particular grey of a Tuesday sunset that’s tinged with a strange yet kind green.

In this world: Mold is a life form. Ants have agency.

None of it extraordinary until someone notices. Which is the very definition of life witness.

This person doesn’t invent what’s there – but pays attention with an uncommon lens.

 

Duende

Spanish. Pronounced: “doo-EN-day.”

Before it became the language of flamenco and poetry, a duende was a house spirit. A mischievous little presence believed to live in the home, influencing what happened inside it. These I believe in too, I’ve had many and often ask them to leave.

Somewhere along the way, the word escaped the house and the meaning.

The Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca gave it a new life; as the force that arrives when something true is the thing behind the thing. Another one of my favorite concepts.

Duende basically says:

Good luck.

You can prepare.

You can practice.

You can become extraordinarily skilled.

And the thing that matters most still refuses to obey you.

I find that incredibly reassuring, and humbling, and freeing.

Lorca also wrote that duende lives close to death. Which sounds dramatic until you realise he meant mortality.

The awareness this performance only happens once.

That this conversation will never happen again.

That this person won’t always be here.

Suddenly, we are inspired to pay more attention.

 

WORDS. ATTENTION. PRESENCE.

Put together, the three borrowed words seem to be describing the same territory from different directions.

Language as spell. I won’t leave it alone.

 

by Tracey Henton