TABLE TALK #158
There’s a particular kind of sadness creeping into written word. Everything is perfectly clear, perfectly polite. Yet nothing jars, surprises, or misbehaves.
It’s competent prose, and somehow, it all sounds the same, which is why a few gloriously unnecessary words feel oddly rebellious. Words that dress up something ordinary, invite you in, then cheerfully undo themselves.
This week’s Table Talk is about those words. The impressive-sounding ones doing laughably simple things.
🍝 MAIN COURSE 🍝
Mid-procedure, he remarked that my legs were “relatively hirsute”.
Or taradiddle, a deeply pleasing term for a small lie. Not a scandal, not a whopper. Just a bit of harmless nonsense.
Atingle sounds poetic, almost romantic, yet it simply means stimulated.
None of these words exist to obscure meaning. They exist because the English language enjoys a bit of flourish. Because sometimes it’s fun to dress up a very ordinary idea, send it out into the world, and see how it behaves.
Business is simply the state of being busy.
🍮 SWEET ENDINGS 🍮
It’s more a memo that words are allowed to have personality. That they don’t always need to be optimised, simplified, or stripped back to the bone.
In a world where so much writing is generated, polished, and made frictionless, there’s something pretty lovely about a word that sounds grand and turns out to mean something entirely ordinary.
🍷 WHAT'S NEW
FROM
WEDNESDAY'S DOMAINE? 🍷
In December, I mentioned how thrilled I’d been to see Wednesday’s Domaine popping up in a handful of publications we really admire.
Well… January has rather blown December out of the park. We’re barely a week in and already The Times, The Independent, The Observer, YOU Magazine, Good Housekeeping and the London Standard have all given us a little corner of their pages.
Luke x
