Learning a New Word

And Letting It Stick, Come Rain, Come Thunder

After our fridge broke down, slowly, with an almost general consent, we turned it into a mini bookstore. This behaviour started offhandedly. Like a gossip. That got more interesting as you talk.

Repairing the fridge was costly. My mother couldn’t afford it. My father always only complained. This fridge ehn, this fridge ehn. We would all then forget the fridge. File it away at the tailend of House Priorities. And my father’s books kept doubling in the house. Trippling. And our Old School books too.

First we kept them on the fridge. Meters high— as tall as a baby. But then we just started filing new books into the fridge. Compartment by compartment. Newspapers, memoirs, brochures, a few novels, burial certificates, birth certificates, Law books, copies of Rhapsody of Realities and Now That You’re Saved, Gideon bibles, women’s magazines which my mother never read, used pens, blue, red, and multicolour pens. Soon, the fridge just became a kind of store for anything with the slight texture of paper. And I always blamed my father for keeping all those papers, all that junk, storing them, all those books, some written in Hausa, many in English, some new and gleaming. And letting the fridge so Book Disposable usable.

He worked as a Sales Rep one time for a publishing company in the city. And he brought a lot of paper home. And for all his meticulousness and caution, books were often everywhere. Scraps too on the dirty-black originally red rug, under the table, on the TV stand, on the computer stand, in the corners where rats eat from. Cockroaches too.

Among all that chaos of books I learnt the first of the English words I knew. Abortion. It is from J.M Elegido’s book, Jurisprudence: A Textbook for Nigerian Students. I was fifteen, with too much time on my hands having graduated High School. I would read that Elegido twice. But in a chapter in the book he argued for the morality of abortion. To me, abortion always meant a woman aborts the baby. I had never thought a word could cause so much anger, so many other fine words like spectrum, morality, and jurisprudence.

I didn’t check the meaning of those words. I loved only their sound. Morality sounded like a word pronounced when eating hot yam. Jurisprudence when you’re finishing the meal course. Spectrum amused me, even shocked me. Because Elegido said something like so-and-so at the extreme ends of a spectrum. In my mind Spectrum was Pendulum was The Lililo Swing at Grace International High School, the North.

This experience influences my current relation to words.

I rarely use words I learnt from the dictionary— I always use words whose sound in context first touched me. I will always choose the sound of a word rather than its meaning. Meaning is already so complex. One thing always means another thing which means another thing, ad infinitum. But sound, the sound of a thing, is unmistakably one. Unified.

Discombobulation sounds like the rumble of a rickety train crossing a rickety train. Specifically, each time the freight train in Osogbo crosses a small, rickety bridge at Olaiya, I would imagine that if the train derailed into the rocky stream below, crashing all the shops, the other second bridge for pedestrians, and into further rocky streams flowing into the Alekuwodo, felling the rickety furniture store there and the old C&S church with dying corn on a patch of soil, the train would be sounding dissscombbobuulatttiiooonnnn.

Anybody who reads this gets the gist of what the word means. Like an old gossip. Always funny— bringing tears— and dangerous, because real humans lay behind all that pile. And there’s always that odd sense that behind a word’s letters and sound, that behind its mask, its mystery, behind its enigma of meanings lay a specific tangible stuff.

However, Cambridge Dictionary unjustly, sacrilegiously, profanely, blasphemously, and heretically defines discombobulation blandly. It ruins the curiousity, the sense of something behind a word, when it defines the word as:

“The fact of being made to feel confused or uncomfortable by something:

He showed his discombobulation by not being sure whether to sarcastically congratulate his rival or attack him.

We feel nostalgia for the past and discombobulation about the future.”