What's your favourite word?

Clue: it's not long.

Over dinner with a friend recently, we started to talk about our favourite words. We’re both writers, when we’re together, we talk shop. I offered dusk, then velvet. Two words I love. Not just for their mouth feel but for what they denote. When I was a child, my mother had velvet curtains, long, dark red, thick, they kept out the dark. This was a good thing, since I hated the dark. I still hate it. I love dusk though. I love the time of day when it settles, the day almost done, an evening ahead if it’s winter, or if it’s summer, a long twilight, dew rising from the garden, sun setting pink, peaceful. The satisfaction of a day done well.

When the curtains became too old, my mother took them down, replaced them with something shorter. Cotton probably. I took the discarded curtains, cut around the worn fabric, made them into a skirt, a hat. I love wearing velvet. I love how heavy it is. How luxurious it feels. How little it needs to accompany it. A crisp white shirt. Red lipstick. I’m thinking here of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy. I’m sure there’s a photograph of her in a black velvet skirt with a white shirt, a red lip.

A few evenings ago, I was picking brambles in the garden. There’s a glut of them this year. I often find my youngest with stained hands and lips. After, I sat in a deck chair under the apple tree, thinking about how much I love dusk. Then I realised, I got it wrong. Velvet. Dusk. Not my favourite words after all.

I often find I am an exceptionally slow person. I’m never the brightest person in a room. Nor the loudest or the quickest thinking. I take a long time to think anything worth thinking. I also take a long time to really work out what I’m thinking. I often wake the night after an interview with the perfect answer. I am largely incoherent on stage. Likely a thing I’m not meant to say as an author or a chair. That’s partly why I started doing this, as a way to not over think. The rule is, I write something quickly, don’t revise it, don’t overthink it or redraft or delete or go back over, what comes out is what’s posted. There that evening, under the apple tree, looking up, wondering how many people a year die from apples falling on their heads in the same way coconuts are prolific killers, I realised the answer, in the way most answers are, was simpler than I’d thought.

My favourite word is three letters long. My favourite word is probably the first I learnt to write, after my own name. I have not used it for the duration of this post which has been difficult. My favourite word is simply and.

And and And and And.

I love a compound sentence and I love a list and I love sentences that span pages. I love them so much that Ava Anna Ada opens with nearly five pages of a single sentence, and makes this possible in the same way and makes Ducks, Newburyport possible and the perfect thing about and is what happens when you suddenly take it out. The resultant short sharp sentences cracking like a slap might.

I am largely not a fan of long words. I find elaborate prose disingenuous, unless it’s very well done. Mostly, it seems to act as a smokescreen for a lack of rigour or depth. I get suspicious when I’m faced with it. I’ll make exceptions for Faulkner, Krasznahorkai, Joyce.

This love of and is not new. My cousin once sent me a letter I sent to my aunt when I was about five. Two pages; one sentence, and and and and after and.

And I was a defiant child and when the teacher taught us we couldn’t start a paragraph with and. I started a short story with it and this story won a national award. I like to think it was the and that did it. Likely the only story breaking the rules.

And more than that, in life, and makes plenty possible. Without and you’re left with full stops. Clean and limited options. Manageable amounts. I am coming to terms with the fact I have always been a greedy person. I am a person who wants this and this and this and this and this and all of it and more of it and to want like this and grow up in a protestant country as a Christian fundamentalist, well that takes a while to square. It helps to realise my favourite word is and for everything it offers, for everything it makes possible and sure velvet drapes beautifully and have you seen Kate’s Gucci ‘95 velvet suit and yes, dusk is often gorgeous as the night unfolds but have you ever felt the raw pleasure of a perfectly placed and? And don’t get me started on how sexy an Oxford Comma is or how much of a turn off a wrongly used one is…and a perfectly executed semi-colon, oh my god…