Word is all we need
The siren song of the right adjectives
Crossing the bottom of my hair conditioner, a colorful label emphasizes the product's power for the deep recovery of damaged hair. After more than a few times using such a product, I see no sign of the advertised quality. How naive on my part, I thought, to believe in mere words, I, the person who has been working with them for most of my life…
Yet, nothing prevented me from being seduced, if not misled, by an empty promise, without even checking the components inside the said conditioner or bothering to learn how such deepness would, in fact, work on my poor hair…
For those of us who love writing, it may be tricky to admit that we also can fall seduced by words, the very raw material of our work and passion. I know that what we so hardly try to do every time we write a piece is exactly that: to attract someone with the power of our words.
The description craziness
The sweet trap of words is everywhere and some people are true artists in creating and involving us in irresistible narratives. I observed this feature in action, firsthand, in the United States. During my many years living here, it fascinated me how any restaurant, sometimes even a mediocre one, could create menus with food descriptions exponentially superior to the quality and taste of their food.
As a Brazilian, I was not used to that. A chicken filet with some onions will be there as it is, and you can consider yourself lucky if any other additional information is provided. A similar offer in the US would rather be detailed and embellished with descriptions like ‘Oven-roasted organic boneless chicken breast topped with a delicate champagne vinaigrette and homemade pickled red onions’…
I have heard about the big buzz of still photos involved in the food industry, which sells an image far better than the real product. But it is interesting to think how much words can similarly operate on our imagination.
Narrating the everyday life
The effect of the right adjective when nicely paired with a fitting noun is after all the bread and butter of writing and writers. A well-constructed narrative that builds beautiful imagery and provokes a sensation or takes us to different worlds is definitely an art. However, what really intrigues me are the little, subliminal things, such as the words that are, subtly or not so much, embedded in our everyday life.
For instance, no matter how wonderful a novel is, the book agents are there to tell us that it is going to need the most appealing title, a clearly defined category to be shelved in, plus a few powerful keywords in the summary for capturing a larger spectrum of potential readers. And the thing is that even the most talented writer sometimes can be short of skills for producing such selling words.
Of course, the strategy is not always brilliantly executed. There are many examples of failed attempts around the world, I'm sure. But sometimes people forget that, hey, there is a meaning attached to a word and maybe this should be the first criterion to explain and describe a product of any kind.
Think about Memento (2000), a movie by Guy Pearce. The word is in Latin, so could be left as it is in Brazil, since Portuguese is a Latin-based language. However, someone wanted to make things easier and changed it to Amnesia, even though the director implies many times in the movie that the protagonist does not suffer from amnesia…
Another choice that ruins the principle of the movie is the bio of John Lennon, by Sam Taylor-Johnson, Nowhere Boy (2009). The title emphasizes the lack of belonging felt by Lennon in his youth years. Someone in Brazil ignored it with no mercy and translated the title as O Garoto de Liverpool (The Boy from Liverpool)!
Fortunately, not all the wordplay is deceiving. Sometimes even a purely marketing trick may be sweet and harmless. I had a professor in college, who is also a children’s book writer, who told me about the title of one of his books, being released at the time: ‘The true story of the two fish’ (A verdadeira história dos dois peixinhos). I asked him why that one was the true story. 'Is there one that is not true?'. He replied in a manner somewhere between professorial and amused that his publisher added the word ‘true’ only to create a buzz. Of course, they assumed, everybody would be more interested in knowing the true story, even though they had no idea what the false one would be…
I discovered he was truly right about that. You have my word!
A version of this text was published with the title “The Seduction of Words” on Niume.com (04.01.2017).
