Bookish

By Libby Walkup
Contributing Writer

I am a words person.

I remember having my first diary at age five, though it’s much more likely I was seven or eight, pink with lock and key. (My sister stole that key at some point, and probably the diary too.) I wrote my first (and only) song (unless you count the shit I make up on the fly while strumming the three chords I know) at age eight. In first grade I read six books for the week. Top of my class and I got to ride the wooden horse during Reading Rainbow (that sounds dirty, but it was very innocent, I swear). I imagine myself in cowboy boots and hat but my memory serves for amusement.

Always earning impeccable scores on spelling tests, I was devastated when I missed the preliminary test for the third grade spelling bee, and to add injury to insult, a Mr. Olson spelled ‘truly’ with an ‘ey’ to lose the round. I fought every muscle in my body from springing up off that gym/lunch-room floor and racing to the front of the room to spell the word correctly and win the bee.

This leads to a bachelor’s degree in English and a master’s in creative writing. Like I said, I am a words person. I have been known to write forty-five minute novel-like emails grappling over the use of “could” or “might” (Seriously. Lately I’ve been implementing deadlines that I almost always break.). Let alone the time I spend agonizing over every word and comma in my poetry or short fiction. Don’t even ask how long it took me to write this 500-word personal essay. This is the concern I place on the importance of words. This is how strongly I feel words affect people. How they mean things. Represent things. Have weight, even if very few people realize how they internalize them. Suck them in through their pores and swish them around a bit until they become a part of person’s core.

I noticed in Britain that everyone I met referred to their partner as a “partner” –- gay/straight, married/unwed. The word gives a relationship a sense of equality, an opportunity to define each person’s place in the partnership from a blank slate. An open, unplowed field. A clean, wordless page.

Dictionary.com tells me that a partner is “a person who shares or is associated with another in some action or endeavor; sharer; associate. A person associated with another or others as a principal or a contributor of capital in a business or a joint venture, usually sharing its risks and profits. A husband or a wife; spouse. Either of two people who dance together. A player on the same side or team as another.”

So, dear readers, even if you don’t believe in the weight of words as much as I do, if you’d like to be a sharer and associate, part of a joint venture sharing in the risks and the profits (and we know how good those profits can be), dance in the living room or be a player on the same team, just a little change in vocabulary has the potential to shift the way we balance each other.

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