Tom Read Wilson - On the Tip of My Tongue: The perfect word for every life moment

THE PERFECT
WORD FOR EVERY
LIFE MOMENT

TOM
READ WILSON

Words are personal. As personal as it gets. We are as defined by words we refuse to use as by our favourites. Some words date and some are timeless. Some words wear their etymology like a glistening pendant and others hide it, pretending they have no relationship with it whatsoever. Words, I put it to you, are at least a thousand times more personal than the garments we wear or the pictures we hang.

We amass our collections of words and phrases throughout our lives. You may be a spry sapling of 30 who decides to spend a penny rather than go to the loo because of your fondness for your maternal grandmother who uses the idiom often. You may love JOMO (joy of missing out) because it is less ubiquitous than FOMO (fear of missing out). You may have been triple jagged because you live north of the Scottish border, whereas I have merely been jabbed. You may be flirting with giving leather-lunged-spouter a renaissance when describing Adele, having heard Tallulah Bankhead say it about singers of her day and feeling more than anything we currently say it is la phrase juste. You may borrow from other languages when they put it more succinctly, or perhaps just to be a touch outr. You may have a special relationship with words like queer, woke, lib, revisionism because of your life, identity and history.

In short, our lexical cherry-picking depends on everything that makes us unique. My dearest chums and close family tell me that the question they are most frequently asked about me is, Does he talk like that all the time? to which the answer is a sincere yes. Mistaken on the radio for Fenella Fielding, Honor Blackman and Angela Lansbury, I have a penchant for a polysyllable, inherited from my father, a former English teacher who also delights in language. After a recent lunch, he said This has been lovely but all-too-brief... then, as often happens, he was arrested by the dance of the synonyms... fleeting, short-lived, ephemeral. You can see how my condition started. It is incurable, as my father will attest. My mother is an impish, irreverent spirit. She is almost allergic to earnestness. If she can, she will stick a pin in anything approaching it. If someone, in awe or surprise, says, Well, well, well! she is apt to respond, quick as a flash, Three holes in the ground!

The best, most intimate portrait of our character is on the tip of our tongue. Within these pages lie some of my favourite examples. Some are my own, some are legendary, some are obscure and some I thought it egregious not to exhume. So, at this juncture, I invite you to tear open my etymological chocolate box, forget etiquette and simply guzzle.

Bon apptit!

vuhb ih vaw noun

Someone who enjoys words and wordplay.

Fret not nor fear, as my dad would say, these pages are not ferociously technical. In fact, I could not cope if they were. They are, foremost, designed to divert and tickle. I always aim to tickle. However, for ease of use, I have included some phonetic (fuhnehtuhk) pronunciations and grammatical parts of speech noun, adjective or verb. You may also need the following words in your arsenal, as I am sure they will appear and I will have forgotten to define them, or it might spoil the flow if I did. Let us start with...