Hi!I I'm Adele, the director for the Ling Space, and I just got back from Minneapolis,
where I spent a few days at NerdCon Stories, which was this fantastic event that was about
stories and storytelling, and I got to reconnect with some old friends, got to make some new friends.
And I asked people I met, what is their favourite word?
All right, so, I think probably my favourite word, or at least the word I always remember,
is the word "macerate", which is to soften by soaking.
And it was a word that I ran into when I was prepping for my GREs, and I didn't know what
it meant, and then, when I looked it up, I was like, "what the f***, why would anybody use this word?"
It was a long time before I started soaking mushrooms, dried mushrooms for cooking.
But anyway, macerate was the word.
Later on, because that word had frustrated me so much during my GRE prep, I ended up
using it in a short story.
We were asked to write stories that were based on single words, and I chose the word "macerate".
So I wrote a story called "Softer", which is all about a man who murders his wife, and
then leaves her soaking in the bathtub.
Okay, I'm a poet, like I just said, so this is like asking me to choose my favourite child.
And they're all my children.
I love so many words, I'm just gonna say for right now, one of the many, many words I love
is "surreptitious", for the sound.
And it sounds sneaky, just like it is.
My favourite word is "kintsugi".
It's a Japanese word that refers to golden joinery, which is a particular type of basically
ceramics repair that they do in Japan.
And the thing about it is that they don't try and hide the breaks.
They will use gold, silver, platinum powder, either mix it in with the adhesive, or apply it afterwards.
So the lines of the breaks are all highlighted, and they're shown.
And the concept behind it is that the breaks that you get in life are part of what make
you beautiful, and you repair yourself afterward, and you are more beautiful for the experience
of having been broken.
Well, see, I think because I'm a writer, I don't have a favourite word, because it's
the sort of thing where you have to be friendly with all of them.
Because you never know when you're going to need even the most slight and tiny word.
And you don't want to have them turned against you at that point, you know?
So I won't name a favourite. I do have a least favourite, and that is "slacks".
Something about it just sounds, you know, 70s and strangely sexual.
My favourite word, or pretty far up there, would have to be "Nusuth", which is a word
in the fictional Gethenian language from Ursula K. LeGuin's 60s feminist science fiction classic,
The Left Hand of Darkness.
In the language, it translates literally to "no matter", which in the context of the story,
refers to a way of life, a philosophical way of thinking, that just means to cast your
worries aside, to focus on the matter at hand, and not all the stuff surrounding it.
And I think in the context of the work and its themes, I think it's good to think about
what it means when certain concepts aren't a necessity.
Like, you're taught to think that they have always been.
When it comes to the Left Hand of Darkness, I think mostly of gender, or certain sexualities.
And that's a philosophy that I've taken in the things I write about, and who I choose to write about.
I like to think about what the social and character consequences are when a certain
aspect of society or technology or, you know, whatever, no longer applies, or doesn't have to apply.
And I love exploring the consequences of that massive shift, whether it's a technology,
social change, what have you.
I love thinking about what can happen if you just stop considering this component.
It also has a nihilistic aspect that I find really satisfying, and not in a sad, depressing,
"oh, nothing matters", but in a... there's an image online of this cool 90s radical dude
with a thumbs up and it's paired with the phrase "nothing matters!"
And I like thinking about that sometimes.
So yeah, that's the meaning that I get from Nusuth, in the Karhidish language, from the
Left Hand of Darkness.