does this sound okay?



though playful sentences have long peppered my blog posts, i fear i've veritably suffocated my 2021 readers with fun (uh, well, to me) language. i blame beowulf: a new translation. i lapped up translator maria dahvana headley's lexical lilt and the buzz it brought on has yet to fade from my lingthusiastic brain. i got into garlanding words that made me swoon (or snort). wordplay became more important than accuracy and then begot accuracy: i found pure self-expression — my voice — in the sounds of words.



it took me a while to notice this. i first chalked up my skyrocketing linguistic legerdemain to a symptom of pandemic boredom. when the Times continue to nosedive into Unprecedented territory, why write precedented sentences?



i only started to see-slash-hear this vocal shift after a chance twitter encounter with a panegyric on rereading the same poem over and over again. reminiscing upon a childhood spent babbling “nonsensical verse," the writer yearned for the good ol' days of "[connecting] to words through their sounds, not just their meanings." this gave me pause. maybe my pandemic-fried brain hadn't been eschewing meaning for sound; maybe sound connected me umbilically to what i'd been trying to say all along.



dantiel w. moniz, author of a short story collection i read and loved, confirmed my suspicion when she shared her own sensitivity to sound in writing. prompted by an interviewer to comment on the “soft power” of her sentences, she gushes:

For me, the single sentence, the line, is supreme. I always go in thinking of not just what it means, but how it sounds, in my head and aloud. What’s the rhythm of it? The image? Nine times out of 10, if I’m trying to find the right word to portray something, I go with the word that sounds right, and when I look it up in the dictionary, it ends up being exactly what I meant.

i too find “exactly what i [mean]” in the “the word that sounds right." a few examples from my latest entry in salad days:

• "the pandemic’s life-on-pause"

• "spurred me on to such starchy heights"

• "unmooring the clock from the day’s usual progression"

• "questionable carb parcel"



all of these quips sound very much like Me. they are very Me! (handwavy, yes, but trust me on Me!) although i wouldn't have had the wherewithal to extemporize them IRL, they manage to bottle up and lay bare bits of my inner monologue. it's easiest for me to ensnare and share my voice where there's plenty of time and whitespace for me to muddle my way through words, self-editing until something sticks.



but, as the punctilious reader will note, i did open this blog post with an “i fear," intimating the anxiety lurking behind my uplifting i-found-myself-in-the-sound story. (the searching title could've also clued you in.)



in mid-september, i wrapped up a zoom food writing course whose centerpiece was peer and instructor criticism. i was humbled when one of my classmates told me that a cooking/coding article i'd successfully pitched to an editor — stay tuned! — was kinda hard for her to follow. though she had taken to my word nerdiness in prior pieces, she confessed that it hindered me from achieving the aim of this one: expounding upon the parallels between cooking and coding for an audience of non-coders.



i was aghast. no shit, she was right! but concern quickly succeeded epiphany: would streamlining my diction be tantamount to reeling in my voice?



i went ahead with my classmate's suggested edits because, in an expository essay, clarity should trump stylish celerity. that said, i still haven‘t extinguished the unsettling possibility that my written voice — my preferred vehicle of self-expression — impedes others from understanding me. this unease begs a question fundamental to my bloggish bent: who am i writing for? me, of course, but also you, whoever you are. by writing, i seek to better understand myself and hope to be understood by others.



i attended a tech conference at which a panelist aptly observed, and i paraphrase: “language is full of abstractions, and, as software engineers know, abstractions are leaky." do other people ever perfectly understand what we're trying to say? probs not, but i'd like to believe that a handful of people can get asymptotically close.



i may modulate my voice a bit more these days, striving to stay cogent for you, but my writing — at least in this blog post — still seems to sound like me. just as i push my words around the page, i'll continue to poke at my question of internal-versus-external coherence before i hit publish.