Harsher Even

"That year a captain got bumped from the lineup...Bam Slokum, til then but a middling six-grade player, had grown four inches taller and ten times as dominant. He came off the bench of the JV B-team to play A-team on varsity as a starting point-guard, and went on to break, in the eight weeks following, three [school] and two conference scoring-records. The captain Bam replaced was called Gregory Gumm, and to get Gummed became slang that for [one clique] was fighting words harsher even than any phrase it might have euphemized."

The Instructions, Adam Levin, p. 237

The insight in this passage is slipped into a stunningly slight clause that weighs a certain kind of word -- a term of art, a piece of jargon, an inside joke -- that is to say a word tethered to the felt world only by the most accidental and anarchic bridge of shared experience -- against another kind of word, a word whose bare sounds are so brutal, so evocative of some brutal fact out in the world, that they must be sanded down somehow or cloaked in other, unrelated sounds. Euphemism is the sand-paper, the cloak.

But Levin's passage reminds us that words are not airtight containers in which we store little bits of the world, but rather soaking strips of plaster that we layer over it trying to capture its hollows and contours. A word will eventually, inevitably take on the shape of what it means. And if it means something mean enough, then over time its consonants will come to prick like pins and its vowels seep like acid.