What’s the word for the stretch of wet sand on a beach, revealed as the wave ebbs, just before the sun dries it? That piece of unmarked land, that drenched sheet, stretched like pastry by the rolling pin wave. We beach walkers try our best to own it. We make it ours briefly with barefoot prints, dog paws and the dragging pull of a child’s spade and bucket. Yet almost as soon as our mark is made, the wave, like an Etch a Sketch, erases. Is its sole purpose to remind us of our ultimate insignificance, or is it there to remind us to keep going, unencumbered by our past? Does it have a name? Not the swash, nor the breaker. The beach, yes, but that quicksand line, waterlogged but coming up for air, time and again, formed as an act of ablation by the sea on the land.
I will find the word. Someone kind will share it and then I will own it forever and use it, in triumphant silence, every time I walk the beach. Possessing it for the first time will be as I imagine a young hummingbird’s first garden foray. Hummingbirds see an array of colors invisible to humans; they own an unknown. Until that moment of ownership, and for want of a better word, I choose to call that liminal space on the beach, hope.
Words matter. We mind them. They work on us and into us. They become the ‘I’. There is a sense of terrible disconnect when we lose them, equal only to the wonder in learning a new one, at whatever age. My new word in the last few weeks is “perfusionist”. I found it beautiful on first hearing, imagining a combination of perfume, percussion, and illusion. A scented musical conjurer perhaps. It is nothing of the sort. A perfusionist is a skilled medic with little time for whimsy. The perfusionist in my life successfully brought a loved one through his liminal moment. The word therefore now has a place of honour, and horror, in my most treasured lexicon.
Wine, like medicine, has its own layers of language. The lay terms are used often to simplify, the technical to add depth to the strata. As students we learn its vocabulary, from sight to smell, from flavour to structure, from start to finish. We believe there to be mastery in precision. Often that is true, but I have equally found there is risk in reduction. It is hard not to let each new tasting become a lesson in learning lines, repeating, and recycling words used by millions before us. I have found the chipping away of intuitive reaction sometimes leaves us only with an inanimate sculpture.
I have respect for the terms approved by better tasters before me and recognise the reassurance that clarity and repetition can bring to the wine table. But the greatest thrill always is hearing a wine description I have not before associated…
