The 256-Crayon Box

I was going to write this week about the tragic disappearance of the word “nymphomaniac.”

It’s a wonderful word.

Nymphomaniac.

Five syllables. Greek roots. Slightly clinical. Slightly scandalous. The sort of word you say while wearing a silk dressing gown and holding a cigarette in one of those long holders.

Today we seem to have replaced it with “whore.”

One syllable. Efficient. Gets the job done.

But where’s the fun in that?

This whole thing started because I was watching Isabella Rossellini in The Saddest Music in the World. At one point, a character refers to herself as a nymphomaniac.

I thought, “God, I haven’t heard that word in 100 years.”

Then, because I am the sort of person who will interrupt a movie to make sure I’m spelling “nymphomaniac” correctly, I looked it up.

That led to another question. Is there a separate word for a male nymphomaniac?

And off I went.

This is how I lose 45 minutes of my life.

Eventually I landed at Merriam-Webster, where I encountered something far more disturbing than the possible extinction of “nymphomaniac.”

There was a button for a “simple definition.”

A simple definition.

Apparently the regular definition of a word is now too much work.

You no longer need to sit there for seven seconds and think, “Hmm. What does this sentence mean?”

Push the button.

We’ll make it easier.

A little piece of me died.

I love words. I love languages. I love etymology. I love finding out why a word means what it means, where it came from, and how it wandered through hundreds or thousands of years before ending up in something I’m reading on the toilet.

Words are crayons.

Some people have the little box of eight.

Red. Blue. Yellow. Green. Orange. Purple. Brown. Black.

Perfectly serviceable.

You want to draw a tree? Green.

The sky? Blue.

A naked man at sunset? Peach, if your box has advanced that far.

Then you graduate to the box of 16.

Then 24.

Then 64.

Suddenly you don’t have blue anymore. You have cerulean. Cornflower. Periwinkle. Indigo. Aquamarine.

And something wonderful happens.

You start seeing differences you didn’t notice before.

That’s what vocabulary does.

It doesn’t give you fancier ways of saying the same thing. It gives you ways of saying things you couldn’t quite say before.

There’s a difference between being angry, irritated, furious, indignant, resentful, exasperated, bitter, outraged, and pissed off.

There’s a difference between beautiful, handsome, striking, elegant, fetching, gorgeous, pretty, and hot.

And yes, there is a difference between a whore and a nymphomaniac.

Thank God.

I like to think I’m walking around with the 128-crayon box.

There are plenty of people with bigger boxes. Writers who send me scrambling for the dictionary. People who know obscure words and somehow use them without sounding like they swallowed a thesaurus.

I aspire to the 256 box.

I want more colors.

Because somewhere along the way, we seem to have decided that making language easier is the same thing as making communication better.

I’m not convinced.

Sometimes precision requires another syllable.

Sometimes an unfamiliar word deserves to remain unfamiliar until you look it up.

Sometimes you should have to stop reading for a moment.

Sometimes you should encounter a word you don’t know.

That tiny moment of confusion isn’t a problem that needs fixing.

It’s how you get another crayon.

So I’m going to keep looking things up.

I’m going to keep collecting unnecessary words.

I’m going to keep choosing the oddly specific word when the ordinary one doesn’t quite do the job.

And I’m going to keep “nymphomaniac” in circulation for as long as possible.

Because life is far too short to color everything blue when you’ve got cerulean sitting right there in the box.