Everything has a name.
The tiny clear plastic ball on the end of new gel pens, for instance—someone must know what to call it. Factory work leaves no time for long-winded description of the thing that needs to be restocked or dumped in a hopper for a machine to jam on the end of the day’s million pens.
This afternoon, sucking up sun before it disappears, sweating in a double layer of fleece, I raked leaves off the driveway and street. Under them and immune to raking by merit of their size, was a layer of tiny leaf chips. leaf debris? leaf flecks? leaf confetti? There’s got to be a name. Someone must know it.
But I swept it—them—one hundred fifty feet of them like waves. Each broom stroke left behind smaller and smaller particles. Leaves, leaf fragments, flecks, powder, memory. I brushed them all under the bushes. Anyone know that name?
Posted by Grace Curtis on November 7, 2011 at 9:58 am
Lovely thought! I don’t know that name. Maybe there is a name in another language. I am often surprised when people say, there’s a phrase a word in Spanish, French or German for which there is no English equivalent. How can that be? Yet it’s true. How many words we have, yet how many more to be had!
Posted by leslienielsen on November 7, 2011 at 1:58 pm
That potential for the untranslatable word is so fascinating! At our house we just incorporate whatever words we need. It helps, of course, to have two at-home languages to choose from! I always feel like those gaps are where we have the chance to witness a distinction between cultures.