Penultimate Day

I have often wondered why our language is so precice in some respects and so loose in others.  Why do we have a word meaning 'second to last' while our words for emotions: love, sadness, pain, are abstract and subject to individual interpretation. We often qualify these words with references to experience to help the reader understand them: for example, 'pain like losing a best friend' as distinguished from 'pain like a broken leg'. But this seems an imperfect solution: there are people whom I miss, but I've never broken my leg.

English is an acquisitive and flexible language. Its complicated, seemingly lawless pronunciation and grammar stems from the fact that it borrows heavily from many other older languages, each with their own rules of syntax and pronunciation. But its complexity is its strength. It's the reason Cormac McCarthy can use the word 'nightsoil' to describe the sludge oozing from the end of a pipe. The word may not have a specific meaning to the reader, but no one reading it would think anything pleasant looking or sweet smelling was coming from that pipe.

I had occasion to think about pain yesterday. Michael, King of the Bumper Cars, woke with a stiff neck. As he lay in my arms, writhing in agony, I wished for a good word, universally understood, that Michael could use to describe the pain. Is it muscular? Skeletal? Nerve damage?

He's much better today, and maybe that's why our words for emotions and pain are so imprecise: these things pass, fading into recollections of situations and people, rather than recall of the physical pain or the emotion associated with them. Thank god, else life would quickly become unbearably painful indeed.