Pet Words

The word “sweet” appears eight hundred and forty times in your complete Shakespeare. Or nearly a thousand times, if you accept close variants (“out-sweeten’d,” “true-sweet,” “sweetheart”). This level of use comes as no surprise to anyone who loves the sonnets and plays: whether in moments of fondest coaxing and chiding (“When your sweet issue your sweet form should bear”) or abject anguish and empathy (“Bless thy sweet eyes—they bleed”), Shakespeare reliably repaired to a sugared lexicon. It’s similarly unsurprising to learn that “flower" and “flowers" bloom on more than a hundred occasions in E. E. Cummings’s poetry; for him, the rotation of the seasons meant that spring followed hard on the heels of spring. Likewise, one might rightly predict that within A. E. Housman’s verses “lad” and “lads” would tabulate more densely than “beauty” or “life” or even “love” or “death.” For him, “lad” was probably the richest word in the language—a modest, slender triad of letters on which he hung his deepest feelings of fascination, lust, exclusion, and (especially when regarding soldiers in uniform) envy and gratitude.

Every poet, every novelist has his or her pet words. Which words these may be dawns on you gradually as you enter the world of a new writer. The deeper you read, the more likely it is that a fresh line in effect becomes an old line, as a signature vocabulary term rings out variations on previous usages. Of course, with many major authors this process of identifying pet words can be hastened and simplified by consulting a concordance. Either way, you’ll likely discover that your author’s personal dictionary contains an abundance of amiable acquaintances, but a select few intimate friends.

I sometimes wonder what could be responsibly deduced about a poet whose work you’d never actually read—if you were supplied only with a bare-bones concordance providing tables of vocabulary frequency. A fair amount, probably. You might reasonably postulate that Housman was homosexual upon learning that “lad,” “lads,” and “man” together surface roughly two hundred times in his poetry, as opposed to something like twenty appearances of “woman,” “women,” “girl,” and “girls.” Or you might—a deeper challenge—presuppose the existence of an essential temperamental and creative schism between two giants upon learning that “tranquil” and its variants (“tranquility,” “tranquilizing,” etc.) materialize more than fifty times in Wordsworth’s poetry and about a dozen in Byron’s. Doesn’t this statistic present, in stark relief, the posed polarities of the poet as contemplative and the poet as a man of action?

At the end of the day, when darkness falls, a concordance turns out to be a sort of sky chart to the assembling night. It shows how the poet’s mind constellates. Even if we’d never read Milton, we might surmise something of his vast, magisterial temperament on being told that “law” emerges some fifty times in his complete poems. We might surmise something further on discovering that “Hell” surfaces nearly as often as “love.”

Yet, to my thinking, the real pet words are peripheral beings, only occasionally reflecting the author’s deepest themes and concerns. They’re capricious and extraneous—or they would be, if the author didn’t welcome them so warmly, didn’t put them on show so frequently. They are stray cats taken in by the author—as in John Updike’s adoption of “lambent” and “crescent” or Anne Tyler’s of “nubbin” or John Cheever’s of “inestimable” or H. G. Wells’s of “incontinently” or Thackeray’s of “artless.” Each of these words presents the critic with a little puzzle of devotion: What was it about this particular package of syllables? Why was this stray cat escorted into the author’s studio and offered a saucer of cream and a plump pillow by the fireplace? It’s not as though the studio were soundproof; during working hours, the author no doubt could hear other strays, seemingly no less deserving, meowing clamorously for admission.

I teach fiction writing to both graduates and undergraduates, and I find that my students are often unaware of their pet words. They’re startled when, at my urging, they do computer searches for words and phrases I’ve indicated. It’s guidance I offer without disapproval, since I share this particular form of blindness. Over time, I’ve gathered a list of words I typically overuse and must monitor. I’m especially prone to modifications of "heart," whether in approbation ("heartening," "wholehearted," "good-hearted") or derogation ("disheartening," "chicken-hearted," "heart-sore," "heartbroken"). A routine search and replace is required before submitting anything for publication.

There’s a peculiar, faintly illicit sensation when you consciously avail yourself of someone else’s pet word. Whenever I use "impenetrable," for instance, I do so as a kind of private joke, since I associate it so closely with Joseph Conrad that I can employ it only as, so to speak, a secret sharer. I suspect that, for Conrad, "impenetrable" may have been the preferred pet among all pet words, the privileged one that sat at table with its master. It certainly feels that way in "Heart of Darkness," in which we meet up with an impenetrable jungle, an impenetrable forest, an impenetrable landscape, an impenetrable night, and, twice, an impenetrable darkness. Similar, even identical phrases abound in "An Outcast of the Islands," "Lord Jim," "The Nigger of the Narcissus," "Nostromo," and (with particularly density) "The Secret Agent."

At first, Conrad’s drumming of the word may look like a mere tic, or a lazy reflex. But in time it reveals itself as an impulse at the core of his earnest, prolific, and—yes—heartfelt undertaking: he was forever pushing for entrance into something he could not enter. The world challenged him, mocked him. The foliage of the jungle, the ruins of a town, the stirrings of unspoken passion, the signalling of the moon on the surface of a distant sea—all were impenetrable. So the writer formed a fist of substantial words with which to knock repeatedly on the unyielding door of life’s inner sanctum.

By contrast, Updike must have lightheartedly realized that he was calling upon "lambent" and "lambency" with rare frequency. It was a conscious embellishment, a sort of sartorial sprucing up of his prose—like a man’s decision to wear a bow tie or a boutonnière. But I suspect that Conrad would have been shocked if a concordance could have revealed to him how commonly "impenetrable" arose in his fiction. Still, it was not merely a favorite word but a favorite concept, and he was not so attached to it that he forwent its synonyms. We see—on returning to the concordance—that "inaccessible" and "unfathomable" and "insoluble" also crop up with great frequency.

Bertrand Russell was once asked to compile a list of his twenty favorite words. He was happy to comply, although he qualified the task by observing that the next day he might come up with a substantially different assortment. Some of his choices are typically poetic ("golden," "wind," "alabaster"), others speak to his scientific temperament ("astrolabe," "terraqueous," "sublunary," "alembic"), and others—the most appealing—feel purely idiosyncratic ("begrime," "diapason," "inspissated"). As far as I know, no practical concordance surveys Russell’s voluminous œuvre, so it’s hard to tell how often he managed to slip a favorite into his essays or memoirs or fictions. But my guess is that whenever Russell incorporated into a paragraph one of his Golden Twenty, the particular sentence took on an extra lustre, a microscopic shine apprehensible to the author alone.

The word "level" belongs on the own list of my twenty favorite words. I love it because it so fittingly embodies its own definition. Could any word possibly look more level than "level"? It’s not merely a palindrome. It’s also all but bilaterally symmetrical—legibly itself if written on a pane of glass and read from the other side. In its perfection, it’s hard to believe it was arrived at through the random evolution of everyday speech and wasn’t an architect or engineer’s construction: it’s a Logos that might serve, in its balanced stolidity, as a firm foundation for a philosophical system, and I felt that I was off to an auspicious start when I snuck "level" into the first paragraph of this essay.

Such words are pets, too, in their gift for breaking down our burdens of solitude. For most authors, surely, the employment of pet words is a private, solitary activity that doesn’t feel fully private or solitary. After all, you’re sharing the moment with one of your pets. And these pets love to participate in what you do—they so enjoy feeling useful.

Brad Leithauser’s most recent novel is “The Art Student’s War.” His collection of new and selected poems, “The Oldest Word for Dawn,” was published earlier this year. He is a frequent contributor to Page-Turner.

Illustration by Hannah K. Lee.