Words We Love To Hate

July 12th, 2009

This snippet comes to you from The Australian newspaper, via the Ledbury Poets Festival in Hertfordshire. Poets at this festival were asked to nominate a word they hated and to explain why. Philip Wells, performance poet, gives his opinion of the word ‘pulchritude.’

“It violates all the magical impulses of balanced onomatopoeic language. It of course means beautiful, but it’s meaning is nothing of the sort, being stuffed to the brim with a brutally Latinate cudgel of barbaric consonants. If consonants represent riverbanks and vowels the river’s flow, this is the word equivalent of the bottomless abyss of dry bones, where demons gather to spit acid.”

Mr Wells has strong feelings. I considered his passionate diatribe against ‘pulchritude’ and wondered if I had a word that I hated. I am temperamentally unsuited to hating for extended periods of time. I hate the lone mosquito on a summer’s night; I hate finding no milk in the fridge. But that’s about it. Or so I thought. Because there is a word I hate.

I hate it not as a poet, not for it’s root, or it’s sound but for how it is used. I hate the word ‘indulgence’. Of course the opposite to indulgence is ‘abstemious’ - a beige, sensible word if ever there was one, a flat heeled, orthopaedic word reeking of protestant excoriation of the flesh. I’ll have the red snakeskin stilettos thanks, with the lot.

I am not a voluptuary, or not all the time, but when I hear ‘indulge’ and think of it’s antonyms, I want to crown my head with a wreath of blowsy roses and dance in delirium along a food laden table, kicking the roast peacock aside, spilling wine from the horn, laughing with my fellow bacchantes in an abandoned celebration of all the joys of the flesh.

The word ‘indulgence’ is scattered liberally throughout women’s magazines invariably linked to chocolate or some other foods. An indulgence, in the religious sense, means to be granted a less severe punishment for a sin. The church will indulge you if you have been good in other areas of your life. Therefore, it follows, if you eat all your vegetables you get the chocolate, or if you have worked all day and come home to cook dinner, supervise homework, put on ten loads of laundry and clean up the cat’s litter tray, you get a chocolate biscuit at the end of it. You have been indulged, you see? Now go forth and sin no more.

But what was your sin you ask, as you scramble for the final crumbs of your biscuit? Your sin, according to the magazines, was to not keep yourself thin and desirable like all the fifteen year olds modelling the fashion that you are too womanly to indulge yourself in. So you get the biscuit, honey.

But don’t feel too bad, croons the magazine, buy this face cream, or that mascara, because ‘You’re Worth It’. You are, no, you are, really. We were just kidding about the dress sizes. You are worth placating because you might buy something if we make you feel bad enough. What’ll it be? The tub of chocolate ice cream or the face cream?

No wonder most women approach food with fear.

I hear the word ‘indulgence’ and I imagine Presbyterian pursed lips and a deeply misanthropic view of the flesh. To indulge in anything more than three serves a day of gruel shrieks of a moral flaw so deep you may never clamber out. Plato and St Paul have a lot to answer for. Two millennia of self-denial, and despite the retreat of formal religion, the culture of sensual denial lives on. You don’t eat food, you indulge in it. And if you feel yourself too impure you can ‘detox’ yourself. Once you could have your purity restored by baptism in the River Jordan. Now you can be saved by colonic irrigation – cleansed of all your fleshly indulgences.

When someone says they are going to ‘indulge’ in the orange cake, or the full fat cheese, or a potato with butter, I want to say don’t indulge, just have it. It’s only food, isn’t it? Well, it was. But our daily bread has been co-opted by the advertisers and the Mega Food Corp and now we have so much food we can torture our collective psyches with it. We can attach more fear and symbolism to it than there are calories in a white chocolate and caramel super sized frappocino. And did this start with words? Probably not, but those hairshirt words like ‘indulgence’ should be left at the back of the cupboard. So you see, I don’t ‘hate’ – I just have intense dislikes.

If you, my lone reader, have a word you particularly hate – for any reason – leave a comment and tell me why.

Related posts

• When Persistence is Futile (5)
• The Black Demon on the Writer’s Shoulder - flick him off or not? (8)
• Pastiera Napolitana (4)
• Writing … odd and distasteful? (2)
• Writer Goes On Holiday (4)

Categories: Food, on writing | Tags: Food, myths, writing