My favourite writings

In 2002, I was given a photocopied page from Irish Times Magazine with the following article. It left me breathless - and jealous. I tried to find an electronic copy, but alas, I had to type it out instead. Enjoy.

Carefully Chosen Words by Molly McCloskey
The Irish Times Magazine, June 15, 2002

Picture this. We’re standing in a word shop, somewhere outside the city. It’s a Sunday, most likely, a day for such indulgences. We’re picking up words and putting them down again, feeling the weight of them, the heft, whispering them to one another. Sometimes we raise our eyebrows, tilt our heads to one side, admiringly. For these are words we don’t use lightly, or on any old occasion. Words like incantata, oblique, billow, woe, susurration, svelte, mote, mink, ilk. Geography, topography, taxonomy. Antediluvian. Prelapsarian. Halcyon. Some people in here are really buying, others only murmuring.

On our way home, we pull outside a convenience store, one of those orange plastic jobs attached to a petrol station. On the outside of the shop, the sign says: Words are cheap! And here, they are. I wait in the car while you go in — and come out with a short list, just a few staples to get us through our respective weeks: greetings, white lies, a bit of phone manner.

As we turn onto Baggot Street, you say unhappily: “Tomorrow, I must go to the retract shop and return those words.” You had a row with your mother the other day and there are things you wish you hadn’t said. (I think you should bring the words to slaughter instead, take them to where they’ll carve them into syllables and letters, mince them to mere dots and strokes. The motto hanging over the door: Better Dead than Said.)

The retract shop is called Give Me Your Word. (Word shop proprietors, like the owners of hair salons, are prone to terrible punning.) A subliminal shame, an apathetic discretion hangs over the place, as in an early house or a porn shop, anything that caters to the more reluctant needs. You’ll join then Said in Anger queue, rather than the Said While Drunk, Dead Wrong, or That of Which You are Simply Ashamed. (They don’t handle words uttered out of excessive or injudicious affection. “They’re like coppers,” they say. “People seem to want to hoard them.”)

You won’t get a refund on your words: it doesn’t work that way. They’re donated, in a sense. Someone else will use them. And so it goes. But they’ll give you a docket entitling you to a discount at the House of Meaning. They’re good like that, those in the reparations business, the way they’ve streamlined operations.

At the House of Meaning, you will head for the Classics Section, searching for words age-old and tested by time, to mend the breach. The staff there drift about like angels and are as wise. You’ll tell them you need something clear and true and good to say, and they will help you to find it.

But the HOM is like no other place in the city. Sometimes there’s practically nothing for sale, and the otherworldly employees just smile enigmatically when we ask. It’s the nearest thing we’ve got to a Zen master, and it’s difficult to know some days whether we’re leaving enlightened or bewildered.

People wonder how the HOM doesn’t go bankrupt. Some say it has and is now a front for something else entirely. Black market word processors, perhaps. But we still shop there, you and I, despite its arbitrary hours – 2 to 4 a.m., sometimes – and the way we never come out with what we went in for. Its reticence strikes us as an invitation to the long haul.

The following weekend, we’re messing in the aisles of Wordplay, the joke shop. This one specializes in malapropisms, which you love. And there are piles of curios: acronyms, homonyms, palindromes, things onomatopoeic. (“Ricochet!” you say, delighted. “Ooze…”) We could spend out lives here – victims of a Saturday, waylaid by agreeable distractions – and never get a thing said.

But it’s time to expand our vocabulary. We need to do some shopping, though we aren’t sure where. We just know we feel limited by the words at our disposal. (Storage space is not an issue here; this is purely a matter of time.)

You say, “Remember that little place we went one Sunday? Incantata? Susurration?”

“What about Truth?” I say.

You shake your head, thinking. “I don’t know where you can get Truth now. Even the shop way out in Swords has closed.”

You’re right, of course. Used to be loads of places that sold Truth but, one by one, they’ve been shutting up shop, and everyone is secretly relieved. You can still find it, but you have to know where to look, and it’s never in the places you’d think.

There is a shop actually called Truth, for instance, but it’s staffed entirely by aspiring MTV presenters and all they sell is irony. What Truth outlets have survived have retreated from their original mission and reinvented themselves. The Word has re-opened as In Other Words, and its proprietor looks perpetually undermined. He sells knick-knacks now, cold comfort and fool’s gold and backhanded compliments.

“No,” I say. “Forget the Truth.”

Instead, we go to the flea market. Much of what we find there is damaged, threadbare, easily overlooked and underestimated. (I plunge my hand into a tub of spare parts: loose Scrabble letters.) But this is where it all began for us, in a benign disorder we didn’t know the value of.

Long before the days of mass production and choosing from a catalogue at Argot. We came here years ago and used these words. We still can.