Amanda Brookfield

I love words. Of course, I love words! Thirty-five years of writing books would have been impossible if I didn’t. Playing with language, thrashing around for exactly the nuance of meaning I am trying to capture, is still such a buzz when it works, and such a torment when it doesn’t.

How words sound – the consonants and rhythms packed among the syllables – is all part of the fun: Kerfuffle, scintillate, woebegone, discombobulate, globule... getting one’s mouth round them is like a game. Even more extraordinary to me, is that small packages of assembled letters somehow contain the power to communicate every emotion on the spectrum of human experience. From mischief and joie-de-vivre: Zigzag! Hopscotch! Whoop! Jubilation! To hardship, suffering and despair: Trudge. Grind. Burden. Harrowing. Agony. Hopelessness. As well as the millions of shades in between.

Words are alive, that's the thing. They flow straight from our hearts as well as our heads, and never stop shape-shifting as they go. They can fall off the radar one century and pop back up again the next. Acceptable in a certain era, a word can become so deeply incendiary and offensive over time that simply uttering it out loud is a crime. And then there are the words that never wither or turn sour, but keep swelling, growing new applications and meanings like some mighty tree.

Lexicographers do their best to keep track, but are like puffing old folk doomed, ultimately, to lose every race. A dictionary, once finished, needs, immediately to be restarted and revised. For words will not be pinned down. They are slippery, mercurial, rebellious, powerful, glorious…and the reason for that is US. The users! We are social animals. Language is as vital to us as oxygen. The need to share, to describe, to connect, to communicate is part of our life-blood, as the pandemic has made brutally clear. Forced to be apart physically, we have spent the last eighteen months reaching out like never before, with our voices, and through every screen we can lay our hands on. We have spawned a new vocabulary in the wake of this, trying to give shape to our endeavours in a virus-infected world: Furlough, lockdown, tier systems, double-vax, ping, self-isolation, zooming, variants, super-spreader, social distancing...

Little wonder the urgency with which billionaires are now blasting off in rockets and entering deal-talks with NASA. Aided by Covid, the word ‘space’ has become one of those shimmering with fresh significance. Crammed together on our over-crowded, over-heating, sickening planet - an increasing hotbed paradise for germs - the adjectives actual, personal and shared are no longer enough to describe the qualities of the space we need. Virtual and outer space are the more powerful avenues to explore, for their potential to offer us physical safety and rescue. Without success in those explorations, we might find ourselves needing another, much bigger vocabulary to describe the dystopian future that lies ahead. Maybe that's where I'll start if ever I decide that Sci-Fi is my bag!