wordways

People use words differently.  It is a mark of friendship

good friends are like stars, you don’t always see them but you know they are always there

when the verbal exchange between you is mutually understood without any effort.  Among my close friends we say “I know you’ll know what I mean when I say” or “since this is a private conversation, what I really mean is…” Or you use a word and add “You know what I mean ?”   If friendship is shelter against the indifference of the wider world,  communication is the mortar that binds the words as bricks – and when there is a misunderstanding, it is a mark of the depth of that friendship that it can be worked through and assimilated.

But friendship is not cut out of the cookie dough of existence

in the same shape.  One friend will be very good at practicalities including real estate, law and divorce.  Another won’t speak about money but is endless supportive in the day to day.  Friendships come and go and grow – but then that’s a personal definition.  I always want to be able to talk about what I am reading and thus what I am thinking, what was in the papers beyond the headlines.  I try to accept that people change, that I change and again it’s the exchange that makes it possible to negotiate such change.

Friendship is a matter of degree

– some go deeper, some don’t.  They are limited but true.

Broadcast news was, I thought, about what we knew with comments from those who knew more than us.  But I fear that a great deal of modern news is about making a story by talking it up through endless commentary and opinion.  And endless is not an exaggeration – hours and hours of different people saying much the same thing – avalanches of words, showers and showers and showers of them – but not advancing information by very much at all.

My sister (13 years older) knew the sounds of war in this country. 

One of the remembered insights of my childish life was my sister’s reaction to a clip of a recording of an aircraft battle on the radio.  But since the end of WWII there has always been a war somewhere.  If it was a long way away, we didn’t give it much attention.  I have a friend of German birth, whose father, a diplomat, got the family out to the US, family members suffered for dissent with the Nazis and war in Ukraine nags at her like arthritis.  Other friends simply ignore the news, they have it reduced to bitesized on an app or they read a newspaper – and newspapers are in the same trap.  To sell copies, they have to have a story to tell and they talk up the bad stuff because it makes for threat and threat is exciting. See Titan. And how it offended me – unless there an agreement I don’t know about – that the ordinary mortals on the submersible, the ones who weren’t worth billions, weren’t namechecked.

Sometimes a few words cut to the chase.  My father’s first question on the phone was always “Are you all right ?” 

which meant to me that everything else could be managed.     A friend who has been through serious upheaval and been out of touch rang me after my health scare with the same phrase.  A doctor, she took me through all the details including drugs, concluding  ”Please take care.  I love you.”   Took my breath away.  The sun in the morning and the moon at night …Kevin Bacon’s finest hour in Footloose when his girlfriend comes down the steps to go to the dance …

Talk’s cheap, we say.   But sometimes it’s the very opposite.  After years of thinking that I wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans because everything I did was transient and intangible, I learned that words – sincere words, (heaven help me) the right words, careful (ie full of care) words – could cross rivers of pain, indifference and confusion, class, colour and gender.   I thought of it as temporary but I met people who remembered such exchange for years. I learned to find the tone like a musician.  I blench when I use words badly or ineptly  – or  to be honest when I know that I have.  If I have lived by “do your best”, I can add “know what you do.”