Words.  Really my currency. All the tools of my trade could be removed, and I could still ply it. As long as I had a way to access words, I can do what I do best.  A friend said to me once that he paid attention to the words I used, because he knew I chose them carefully.  I would say quite the opposite is true.  I am rarely careful with my word choice (one of the many problems with being an impetuous creature) but I can, and do, quickly find the word I think will have the most impact. (That’s another funny story about a Prof I co-taught with one time– he would NOT approve my choice of the word “impact” there). I have a large lexicon in the language centre of my brain, and I relish the opportunity to use delicious words like “ameliorate”, “prescient”, “inchoate”…

I was watching this video this morning (as an aside, I share it here, although it is completely off topic: Gallileo! Galileo!) and I got to thinking about the word “void”.

In the video, the scientists create a vacuum. In modern, household terms, we think of a vacuum as something that sucks up a whole bunch of stuff we don’t want. But isn’t it really referring to the process of sucking up or out, not collecting. In any event, into the void I went…

I find it interesting that “void” and “avoid” are bastard cousins.  A marriage (in around 1300) of the Old French “evuider” (meaning to clear out, get rid of) from the root “vuide” meaning empty, which in Middle English defined the word “void”. To me, it becomes a negative concept– just because I avoid something, that thing is not “empty, gotten rid of”.  In fact, usually quite the opposite–“avoid” is the only way to handle A Thing Which is Painful or cannot be gotten rid of.

It almost suggests to me that avoidance is the bedfellow of withhold or carpe diem’s evil twin: amitte diem.

There may be a reason I have never seem Ammitte Diem printed on a coffee cup.