Good Words Bad Words

On vacation in a Barnes and Noble I picked up a book about the Genome and came across the word hereditable. Not, in and of itself, a shocking thing to find in a book about the Genome, rather more shocking to willingly read such a book, on vacation, in LA. It was a distraction never the less. I sort of got stuck on the entire sentence. I found myself rereading the word hereditable and then starting the sentence over in an attempt to rediscover its lost context. Even now, retyping it, I find myself parsing out the ('Her' 'ed' 'it' 'a' 'ble') syllables in order to accurately spell it.

Hereditable is clearly a bad word, not bad in the vulgar sense, not even bad in the sense that it is ununderstandble. Maybe when a word becomes so distracting that it implores an audience to ponder its very virtues, a word has reached its ultimate underachievement.

Words are not like figure skating or sumo wrestlers; they do not improve or worsen with increased complexity, size or physicality. In a sense they are spineless and lack integrity. A word need not be spelled properly in order to interpret its meaning. 46 chromosomes define a human, yet goood with three o’s is just as good.

A word can’t be bad because of how it sounds. Jack Nicholson proves that point.

Often it’s the people who use words that frame their quality. Bob Dylan employs words to artfully step through meter and fall into verse, while a politician from Alaska robs paul to pay peter, claiming a gift not a purse. Words also age like their employers. Mr. Tamborine man would look different today than he did in 1965.

So maybe it’s all about context? Some words can overshadow others. Complexity of a subject takes away from complex words and complex words take away from complex subjects.

Words are the chromosomes to our body of language. They construct voice for our ideas and drive the vehicle of our knowledge. Where a good gene falls in the right part of the cell at the right time to define life, is that similar to a well-placed word in long overdue ending? According to the Genome book our complex fabric of human life can be broken down into 4 simple letters, then maybe hereditable should be left for simple sentences, with simple subjects.