The Overuse of Sesquipedalian Language in the Futile Search for the One Word We’re All Looking For

Within the sprawling architecture of human discourse there exists a peculiar and persistent tendency toward linguistic hypertrophy. Scholars, philosophers, poets, and professional explainers of the human condition have, for centuries, demonstrated an almost devotional commitment to the accumulation of increasingly elaborate vocabularies in their attempts to articulate the fundamental motivations of our species.

Libraries groan beneath the weight of these efforts.

Whoa… hold on a minute.I was going to make some sort of a joke about swallowing a Thesaurus , but you lot already know that’s bollox. What happened is simply that I let the AI have a field day .

Here’s why…

I’m sitting in my dustcart listening to James O’Brien on the radio and he dropped some enormous word into the conversation like it was nothing.

Next thing you know I’m sitting trying to remember it so I can look it up later.

The first one I ever learnt was defenestrated.

Which, in case you’re wondering, means throwing someone out of a window.

Not a word you hear much on a refuse round…unless the conversation gets a bit heated.

Though to be fair we normally skip the Latin and go straight to calling each other wankers.

Of course the first thing you do after learning a word like defenestrated is try to use it in a sentence.

I may or may not have informed a manager during a particularly lively discussion that he was about to be defenestrated.

I also suggested he might want to look the word up later.

I said that last bit very quietly under my breath.

Wouldn’t want to upset the poor lamb.

Still… I remembered it.

Anyway , I digress I was going to try to ask why we need such bloody great big words anyway?

Here’s  an enormous word with only four letters .

Love.

All those sesquipedalian words… just to explain that.

 My word what a beautiful word that is .

Think on it just for a  second .

Four little letters that literally make the world go around .

Everyone chasing it.

Some people losing it.

Of course you see the other side of it as well.

You see a lot from a refuse round if you’re paying attention to people.

I’ve seen couples walking down the street holding hands like the rest of the world doesn’t exist.

And I’ve seen the opposite.

Once I watched a bloke in the street shouting up at a bedroom window while another bloke was shouting down at him, with the girl in the middle screaming at both of them.

Whole street watching.

Real life playing out like a badly written soap opera.

People chasing love.People losing it.People fighting over it.

Teenagers discovering it like they’ve just invented the whole idea themselves.

Young couples clinging to it like oxygen, convinced the world might stop spinning if they let go.

Some people looking for it in all the wrong places.

Others realising far too late that they already had it sitting quietly beside them the whole time.

And then there are the old couples.

Sitting together in cafés or on park benches, saying almost nothing at all.

Sixty years of conversation already done.

That’s the kind that impresses me the most.

To me love is everything, and most other things in life are superficial bullshit.

  Even Johnny Cash sang about a thing called love while sitting in a jail cell for nicking flowers out of someone’s garden.

Probably for his bird.

Anyway the point of my little blog here is to suggest that

We all need this thing, and we all talk about in in our different ways.

It’s like this bloke down the pub said to me once — and I’m paraphrasing here off the top of my head —

“Psychologists talk about attachment theory, pair-bonding, emotional reciprocity and relational fulfilment. Sociologists prefer phrases like social cohesion, interpersonal validation and collective survival. Evolutionary biologists explain it all through procreation, biochemical attraction and genetic advantage.”

At least that’s what I think he said, we were about six pints in.

Which is a lot of syllables just to say people want someone to love them.

Which is probably why philosophers and psychologists spend so much time trying to explain it.

But after all the long words and complicated theories, it still seems to come down to something very simple.

Four letters.

Love.

I got lucky.

I found mine when I was eighteen.