Open Writing

Take a word you really enjoy, its feel, taste and sound. It probably looks good on paper, too. Here's a lovely word:

Voluptuous

A big, generous, juicy word. It makes me think of a Persian cat in the sun, purring under a casual caress, stretching and yawning, begging to be touched, stroked. A tactile word.

With clever use of puns, innuendo, nuance, mutations and cross-referencing to other languages, much fun can be had. Playing with language in this way gets the brain ticking over, thinking laterally and enhances the ability to use words with increasing confidence and effect.

For many years I was lucky to work regularly with a quintet of musical friends. We played together at least twice a week, in chamber music sessions and at orchestra rehearsals. Each of them enjoyed the taste and feel, the sound and the effect of words.

Haydn often thought laterally, out loud, to the point of burbling nonsense. This generally reduced me to helpless laughter. Following his thought processes was a wonderful rehearsal for dreaming up stories, making the most of words, thinking in sideways directions. One evening, his starting point was the name of the conductor of the orchestra. "Bernard... Bernardus... Burnt Bananas..."

Jack, muttering about the title of a musical play, "Dames at Sea," mutated the title through "Dams at Sea" to cross-languaging into Afrikaans, "Duims at Sea", which conjured the most ridiculous pictures in my mind of thumbs tossing and pitching through the waves.

One of the members of the orchestra brought her young baby to rehearsal. The youngster objected vociferously to the Dvorak Slavonic Dance which we were rehearsing. Clive said something about bringing ‘ear muffs’ for the baby, which Haydn immediately translated into "beer" muffs.

One evening, we were playing a work which I thought particularly ghastly, a quintet by the French female composer Claude Arrieu.

"This work," said Haydn appreciatively, "is growing on us!"

"That sounds rather fungal!" I remarked, thinking fungal was a far cry, if only one letter away, from fugal.

"Yes," retorted Clive, "like athlete's flute!"

That put me, a flautist, in my place.

Many of the "instructions" in music are given in Italian. One of these words, "tenuto", means to play a note or series of notes each with their full time-value. We tripped up over one of these passages, and came to a halt.

"Imagine," said Haydn, "playing with ten new toes!"

"I've only got ten old ones," I retorted. "Besides, I use my fingers on the flute."

"Just as well, if you've got ‘athlete's flute’." With Clive around, I couldn't win.

We continued with another piece. This time, the instructions were in German. Haydn came to a spluttering halt. ‘Mit partial tönen’ was the stern instruction. "Playing with partial toes might be possible with athlete's flute." Haydn mused.

During one session I raised the subject of "engrams" - one of the teachers at the school where I worked had asked me the meaning earlier, so I threw the question at my open-minded musicians. It turned out that this referred to deeply-implanted, subconscious pain memories which trigger unexpected emotional reactions. Such memories could originate as far back as the womb, or even a previous life. Clive told us of a woman he knew who cried every year when she watched the Comrades Marathon on television. Naturally, being Clive, he concluded that she was probably suffering from ‘athlete's fetus...’

Learning to play with the language we use each day gives us insights into word-usage that can't be gleaned in the classroom.

Until next time that I get to play with words... Here comes Treble!’

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by Isabel Bradley

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