My relationship with words is exactly like my relationship with women: I can never find the right one when I’m looking. When I’m not looking, they find me. Finding the right word at precisely the right time is agonizing. Wait. What I mean to say is not finding the right word, right now is agonizing. It kills me when I have to settle for some other word that doesn’t quite encapsulate what I’m feeling. That’s the tough part. Finding a word to convey a thought, is easy. But until a feeling I have is solidified and released as a word, I remain emotionally constipated. Maybe that's why it would be so much easiar to listen to my gut feelings if it talked instead of groaned.

Until the day my gut feeling does talk, I have to somehow speak for it, acting as my own translator. Which means I’m searching for the right way to talk to myself. Which means, when my search is over, I say what I mean and mean what I say. So I’m a little put-off by people who volunteer a “better” word in place of the one I spent hours digging for. For one, that’s just plain fucking annoying. Two, it had better be an earth shattering surrogate to justify the annoyance.

I recently used the word “subsidize” in a rhetorical context. Kind of how people use the expression “co-sign” when seconding anorther’s antics or opinion. The guy I was talking to asked me to clarify my use of the word. He was proud of himself. He later used the word “regurgitate”, also in the rhetorical. I handed him a napkin and asked him to clarify his use of the word. Yeah, it was petty. But that’s my point.

Like language itself, most words are three dimensional and, consequently, you can slice and dice them anyway you want and there will still be, at the very least, two sides. This makes it very difficult to “own” a word and the meaning it carries. At best, you’re staking claim on one side of the word, while the other person, who is either confused or petty, takes the other. Sure, you can interrogate a chosen word, or even hold it hostage, but that won’t stop language from doing what it does best: evolve. Just like the human body, given enough time, words take on new meaning and even new shape. They grow a few letters here and abandon a few letters there. Before you know it society has adopted a new word, even if it is doomed to be treated as a step-child. Clearly communication will always be a challenge for human beings. Conversations, even tougher. Debates, however, will come easy.

While I do fight with myself for the right word, I don’t fight over words with others. Nor do I demand that the other person put together air-tight sentences. I’ve come to understand that words and language are an approximation of meaning. This is very much in the same way that “truth” can only hope to be an approximation of “fact" and fact an approximation of reality. So, yes, something as ambiguous as “clarity” will always prove to be slippery at best, even when gripped by the tightest linguistic fist.