The ‘Mot Juste’ by Trevor Thorn. (Or is it ‘Le’?)

 

Image credit Pixabay free images

 

In my secondary school days, I was blessed to have an English master who, I now realise, inspired a love of our language which, combined with my desire to read widely, gave me a broad-based, maybe even extensive vocabulary.

 

This was supplemented by my being a choirboy from the age of seven. So, Sunday after Sunday, twice a day and at two choir practices every week, I was immersed in the language of the psalms, the canticles, hymns, and two Bible readings at every service. Inevitably the vocabulary of the Anglican church became familiar, even if I was not always wholly attentive to the content of what I heard!

 

These two substantial influences merged to make me an enthusiast for formal debating; first as a member of my secondary school debating society and school team, then later as a team member of a Junior Chamber of Commerce debating team which made its way to the national finals, where we lost to an extremely fluent team from Dun Laoghaire. 

 

Words were always a joy to me and although I did not have to be a wordsmith to join the long-gone Midland Bank, it was there that I started to write songs to well-known tunes for branch members as they retired. It became important to find the right words that balanced what they had achieved in their lifetimes in the bank, (in those days one joined a bank ‘for life’) with a light-hearted telling in rhyme of one or more unusual incidents from their banking days: everybody had at least one.

 

From there I branched into doggerel for grandchildren, songs for important family and friends’ anniversaries and later into more serious themes which now form the substance of my mainly poetry blog ‘The Cross and The Cosmos’. All the way though these changes, it was a joy, and often fun to be able to find The (or should it be ‘Le’?) Mot Juste to convey as precise meanings as possible to illustrate the ideas I sought to express.

 

Apparently the ‘Mot Juste’ was an expression first used in literature by the novelist Gustave Flaubert who would spend weeks looking for the right word to use to encapsulate concepts with exactitude.

 

Flaubert obviously had far more patience than me, for whilst I will cudgel my mind for a considerable while to find a suitable word, I normally look for more rapid results. Some may say that impatience occasionally shows through.

 

That was all very well while my synapses were agile and ideas flowed freely around and from my brain, emerging on to paper or screen nearly as fluently as the Irish debating team of earlier years developed their hypotheses and arguments.

 

But now it is not like that, finding the Mot Juste is often an uphill struggle: I know there is a word that would once have come rapidly to mind but sadly, not any longer.

 

I was then, delighted, or perhaps, more, relieved, when a considerably younger member of ACW confessed on her Facebook page to using an IT based Thesaurus and a web-based rhyming dictionary. Thanks to A, I no longer feel guilty at such tactics!

 

So I hope in producing this blog-post I will free up others to feel it is wholly legitimate to use these valuable computer and web-based tools. It is not difficult to imagine that Flaubert might well have been delighted to call on such help, rather than have to labour through, no doubt, many hefty tomes to find precisely the word he needed to express his thoughts. 

 

He must have had stronger arms than me as well as more patience!