Words: a beloved engine of communication and fun

” Quite suddenly, with blinding insight, the secret of their blissful marriage was revealed to me. She couldn’t speak a word of English, and he couldn’t speak a word of Spanish.” 

Call the Midwife: A True Story of the East End in the 1950’s by Jennifer Worth

Having been married myself now for almost 18 months I cannot even begin to write tomes of wisdom on the subject, but I do love to collect quotes from books I have read. I share them first with my husband, who generally mumbles ‘ahem’ while distractedly reading something else. Then I highlight and save the clipping to muse over later.

WORDS

He may not be terribly interested in the latest quote from a novel I’m reading (because I consume fiction and he prefers news and non fiction books about language etc), but we do have that in common, a love for words. We break them up, make them up, argue about them, discuss them, laugh about them, play them for the highest score and generally feast on them.

I have my parents to thank for that love. I know they read to me in turn from the moment I could point out and notice a picture on a page. My father regaled me with tales about William and Sherwood Forest, my mother with crime novels (not when I was a baby of course) until I basically slipped into the world of WORDS, STORIES and CHARACTERS. My mother made us outfits for whichever character in a book or a film took our fancy and we were suddenly there in the story.

I digress from the title of this blog post… where am I going with this? Communication … is important in marriage? Tenuous I know :).

SMALL PRINT
Really just an excuse to talk about my love affair with words.