concept words and overused phrases

we were on tour together. there was a piece of his that i liked more than anything in our whole show, and a line, a line that stayed with me, the fragment of which is

“this... this must be...love. or some other overused phrase”

the thing with words, is no matter how much you love them, love them the way i do, is at times, at times when you are striving to express something right, true, accurate, to find a new way of saying that which has been said by so many before, so many times before, that even you have said many times before, that suddenly...

suddenly what you want is new words, new phrases, maybe even a new dictionary of words to express that this feeling, this feeling you have presently, comes attached with new sensations and thoughts and revelations. maybe you should have put more into learning those second and third languages after all? maybe then you could always find the right words for what you wanted to say.

This performer i toured with spoke at least five languages. His knowledge of poetry, literature and pop culture spanned everything from baudelaire to keats to mos def to polish poets i’d never heard of. He knew something about various forms of written expression that i didn’t. So I put it to him.

English didn’t have enough concept words, I said. concept words the way japanese or portuguese or german or french seemed to have. I told him how every so often i learned words in these other languages, that sometimes can’t be translated, and longed for my language to have more words like this. It might even change the way i wrote. I said.

he disagreed with me, said that i was shortchanging the english language. he’s probably right, it’s silly to blame my failure to express myself on my language.
after all, isn’t that akin to a craftsmen blaming his tools?

and then i think, maybe the real joy is, feeling something that i don’t quite know how to say.