Ernestly Speaking

Whatever language you write in, words are often multivalent. I am currently sitting at the Detroit airport waiting for a flight to a reunion with friends from Vienna. I happened to sit next to a German mom and her daughter. The young daughter lives here. The mother is visiting.

The waitress brought their check and said, “There’s no rush.” The mother asked her daughter, “Was heist, ‘rush’?” What does rush mean?

Indeed, what does ‘rush’ mean?

Verb: To hurry; To be pursued by a sorority or fraternity; what a quarterback does through a sea of defensive giants in the quest to move the ball without throwing it.

Noun: A hurry; A reed–usually in a boggy area; a flatttened stem of such reed used to weave into baskets; The pile up at Macy’s on Black Friday; The feeling you get from too much espresso (or flying over a mogul, or seeing the face of your beloved, or reading an awesome sentence…).

Adjective: Hurried. (“It was a rush job.”)

In other words, ‘rush,’ like so many words, is multivalent.

One beauty of good prose is that words can go beyond their understood and agreed upon values.

Perhaps a sign of good writing is to be able to mix contexts, juxtaposing the meaning of a word with some other experience.

Dean Koontz describes a villian in his genius book, Odd Thomas. The police chief says to young Odd, “But then you’re on the side of the gods, and this bastard sounds like a giant albino cockroach on a day pass from hell” (Random House, 2017).

Or Anthony Doer in All the Light You Cannot See, describing the occupied city of St. Malo: “Now it seems there are only shadows and silence. Silence is the fruit of the occupation; it hangs in branches, seeps from gutters. . . . So many windows are dark. It’s as if the city has become a library of books in an unknown language, the houses great shelves of illegible volumes, the lamps all extinguished ” (Scribner, 2014. p. 348).

That’s the challenge, friends, to write words that cause the reader to pause, chuckle, remember, imagine, sigh, or shudder. Or even, to give them…(wait for it)…a rush.