TBT #9: There is No Such Place

I used to overuse the word ‘myriad’, and it pissed off a lot of my high school teachers. It got to the point where I would craft sentences in such a way that I would be able to use the word, even in places where it was completely unnecessary. I just thought it was a really great word, one that deserved to be used as much as possible. There’s something great about such a weird-looking word that essentially means ‘many’.

These are the Best Things Ever for Friday, September 24, 2004.

Facts about the word ‘myriad’

1) It has as many vowels as it does consonants.
2) Technically, it should only be used to indicate an amount of objects that are innumerable.
3) Though it’s far more commonly used as an adjective (”There are myriad fish in the ocean”), I prefer the older (and still correct) usage, which places it as a noun (”There are a myriad of fish in the ocean.”)
4) It is a really cool word.
5) It originally referred only to a thousand of something.

That last one is interesting

I’m no longer an English major, so I really shouldn’t be wasting my time thinking about this stuff anymore, but I find that change fascinating. It reminds me of the word decimate which meant, originally, to kill or destroy one in every ten of something. In other words, to reduce by a factor of 1/10. If you see 10 penguins and choke one of the penguins with its own intestines, you have quite literally decimated that flock of penguins.

Of course, these days, the word is pretty much used interchangably with the word obliterate, likely because it’s very rare that anything is literally decimated, in warfare or otherwise. Nobody takes care to precisely eliminate 1 in 10 of ANYTHING. It involves math and, honestly, the only people who like math are jerks and whores, and they’re best ignored and done away with.

So the words change. They adapt. They move on. And it’s such an effortless change, for all its impact. In the end, nobody really cares that decimate now means obliterate and myriad now means a lot. Even worse, nobody cares that irregardless doesn’t really say anything that regardless didn’t already. These changes just happened, naturally, and it was only the uptight assholes in the stuffed shirts who realized what had happened, years later.

I go back into my past now with such hesitancy. It seems like there’s a two year rule — everything I read that I wrote more than two years ago really sucks, in my eyes. And there doesn’t seem to be any stopping this rule. Two years from now, I’ll likely read this and think it sucks. “What the fuck!” I’ll say. “Who wants to read a bunch of paragraphs about fucking cocksucking asslicking etymology?” (I’ll likely be far more profane in two years time.)

Does it stop?

Honestly, because it’s not just writing. It’s everything. You look back on some of the things you did and were a part of just months ago and you can’t BELIEVE how much you’ve changed. You’re ashamed by the fact that you listened to Vertical Horizon’s Best I Ever Had on repeat for weeks on end. You’re disappointed in all the time you spent wrapped up in Stephen King books. You can’t believe the money you spent on people you never really liked. You wonder how you ever loved somebody so completely wrong.

Do the meanings stop changing? Does the regret stop happening? Will you ever be solid, fixed, affirmed and sure in yourself? Or is there no such place?

They decimated the myriad of soldiers

It’s become clear to me that there really isn’t such a thing as maturity or adulthood. Not as attainable absolutes, anyway. No matter how old we get, we’ll always feel a little awkward, a little insecure, a little bobble-headed and a lot unsure of ourselves. We’ll always evolve beyond what we are, because, in the end, staticity is just boring. The best we can hope for is that when we look back on who we used to be — on how things used to be — we see something not entirely unlikeable.

It’s just very hard sometimes to deal with the idea that it isn’t going to stop.

There Is No Such Place

This week’s song is, totally coincidentally, Augie March - There Is No Such Place. Augie March is an Australian band often compared to Jeff Buckley and Radiohead by people who spend way more time thinking about music than I do. This song, off their 2000 album Sunset Studies, was written by their former keyboard player Rob Dawson. He was killed in a car accident shortly afterwards.

It’s a very pretty song with a lot of piano. Just as I like it. I will, probably, end up not liking it so much in a couple of weeks, but, honestly, why worry about that now?

Matt