A year ago thereabouts, I went to the downtown library to browse books. It so happened a wedding was occurring in the library's courtyard and I left to go home at the same time as one of the guests, who like me, was taking the elevator to underground parking. She was wearing a dress and high heels and had a date. When the elevator dinged and the doors opened, I waited for them to go first, but she said, “No you! It looks like your arms are going to rip off!”

I like words. I like making a game of choosing the right ones and play at that with the children sometimes, providing them synonyms and nuance. The word rip seemed particularly violent. Rip sounds like flesh tearing, like jagged dismemberment, issuing blood. The violence of the word could, in a Freudian slip kind of way, suggest the violence of the mind from which it came. Had this young wedding guest played too many videogames? Or watched too many horror movies? I was only holding a pile of books, on cooking and home decor.

But a love of words can be an impediment. Communication is laborious enough as it is, why add to it particularities of usage? In fact, words are two dimensional and action is the thing that gives meaning. Perhaps what that wedding guest saw was a person full of words, full, full, full, becoming like paper herself and she was alarmed that all this paper, under stress, fragile as it was, would, indeed, rip. Maybe her word choice was perfect and I’d wasted all this time thinking it was not.