Image: A rose from our garden.
Just about everyone knows the line "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet," from Romeo and Juliet. While I appreciate what Shakespeare was saying, that the essential nature of things is unchanging regardless of what we call them, I have a bone to pick with Will on this one. Yes, I am on a first name basis with the Bard, as much as I am with anyone who died more than 400 years ago, but that is beside the point. My argument is that words are not interchangeable. I love a thesaurus because it can help me upgrade a word to one that better conveys the sense of what I want to represent. The risk is that it can also make that statement less effective by downgrading the impact of my sentence.
Words have power, and each is powerful in a different way.
I love the macabre, and the glorious words we can play with when storytelling around the macabre. Cemetery is a good word and immediately conjures up an image in people's minds, but graveyard is much better. It's creepier. Mausoleum is powerful, but it doesn't hold a candle to the word crypt. Crypt and mausoleum may both describe a building that houses the dead, but the images they bring to mind are very different. Mausoleum is a stately word. Crypt conveys a sense of disrepair and menace that mausoleum lacks. Ghouls and revenants can flourish in a crypt but would be nothing in a mausoleum.
A few years ago, I went to a funeral in a small town in Kentucky. The city owned and ran the cemetery, so the cemetery employees were municipal workers who also did street repair and snow removal and an assortment of other tasks. After the funeral, we went to the cemetery for the internment. The deceased had been cremated, so all we had to bury was a relatively small box. The workers had dug the grave earlier in the day. It was a small opening, perhaps 18 inches on a side. In order to protect the grave and anyone walking through the cemetery, the workers had covered the opening with a square piece of metal that turned out to be a face-down street sign. They removed the grave 'cover' once the burial party had arrived at the graveside. Once they lifted the sign away, we could all read it.
Dead End.
It was devastatingly funny and terribly disrespectful. I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing out loud. I have never been able to reconcile if the cemetery crew was clueless or reckless. Luckily, the deceased's sister never noticed the sign. She would have collapsed if she had seen it. No Left Turn just would not have been as impactful.
I have not addressed politics in this blog--although politics is all about narrative and fiction-- but I feel the need to address the recent cat eating claims about Springfield, Ohio. I grew up in Springfield and still have family that lives there. I was not surprised at all to hear accusations of people stealing pet cats and eating them. Springfield has always had a weird affection with eating cats. Back in the late seventies, when I was in high school, persistent rumors floated around about cats being served as food. These rumors usually targeted Mexican and Chinese restaurants, although one year it was the local McDonalds that was smeared. The rumor was always the same. Someone's friend of a cousin had gotten a glimpse inside the kitchen and instead of beef or chicken, they were serving cats. Or occasionally, rats. The weird part was that no one believed the rumors, but they spread relentlessly, year after year. The funny part was that no one ever avoided any of the restaurants that were targeted by these rumors. It was almost seen as a badge of courage to eat at one of them after someone told you what they were serving.
There were a lot of hunters in the Springfield area when I was growing up. That meant that many of us regularly ate rabbit and squirrel and grouse and pheasant and duck and venison and even groundhog, but we never ate cats.
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