by be.aaron
I consider myself to be somewhat sophisticated, well educated and reasonably well traveled, so I find it embarrassing that millions of people in the world routinely master multiple languages while I am still learning new words in the one language in which I claim fluency.
Recently, I visited the Jasper Johns Gray exhibition at The Met and there I encountered, for the first time, the word: moulage. It was used with reference to the process in which his stunning silver flags had been made. Doesn’t it sound just like mold meets collage? I also learned from Johns that the colors I used to prefer– oranges, greens, purples are colors he favors as well, the tertiaries.
But suddenly this week I am seized by the color blue. I never liked it before because it seemed like an institutional default color but now in my own wardrobe, it feels new.
During my very brief tenure teaching creative writing, as an intro to an exercise using the word blue, I would read this by Jean Cocteau:
THE SECRET OF BLUE
The secret of blue is well kept. Blue comes from above. On the way down it hardens and changes into a mountain. The cicada works in it. Birds work in it. Really we don’t know anything. We speak of Prussian blue. At Naples the Holy Virgin remains in holes in the walls when the sky retires.
But everything is mystery here. Mystery of sapphire, mystery of the Holy Virgin, mystery of the siphon, mystery of the sailor collar, mystery of the blue rays which blind us and your blue eyes which go through my heart. 
And speaking of Roy G. Biv, my cousin, a lawyer, tells me that colorable is what a case must be to be worthy of presentation in court.
During the winter I was in love with the word trochanter. In my pilates class whenever the instructor asked “Where do you feel this?” I’d always reply with the T word just to say it out loud.
A few years ago, during a medical exam, I was told, with regards to sex, “Use it or lose it.” I have since had occasion to discover that, au contraire, desire can lie dormant a long, long, oh a very long time, but it does not die.
However I do think, with regards to vocabulary, one must keep exercising, increasing capacity, maintaining curiousity and staying alert to the presence and context of new words. Otherwise things will, by default, remain forever awesome. Can we please revert to using this word as originally intended and in all other ways, lose it?
