Guilty by Definition

by Susie Dent

Martha touched her necklace, slowly running the pair of silver hearts back and forth along their chain, her private rosary.

That language defines us and is the framework of our thought, an endless, shifting, complex dance through time and human nature. It is about patterns of life and the need to communicate them; it is about dying, renewal, and everything in between, about chaos and the order we make from chaos, the blood and bones of every history. Above all, it is about the slow, insistent pull into the secret lives of the ordinary.

Made men can be unmade.

The very first secretaries were keepers of secrets.

Alex had what the Italians called sprezzatura – the kind of studied nonchalance that implies no time has been taken at all to look a certain way, even if it has been achieved through considerable effort.

mean, Oxford is glorious, but it’s also very pleased with itself.

‘Apparently gossip is a positive thing. It’s community bonding. I mean, look at all the vocabulary for it we have to deal with: gabbering, yaddering, gasbagging, jaffocking, chamragging

‘Elf-shot,’ Alex finished. ‘A conversation with Charlie left you with tiny wounds dealt by invisible archers, and they festered.’

We’re all so obsessed with our own problems and with how people see us that we create simple silhouettes for everyone else.

The things we do to protect our families. The ones we are born into, the ones we make. The quiet compromises.

Safi saw no reason to equate intelligence with a monochromatic wardrobe. The world was on fire, and her generation had sweet FA to look forward to, so why not at least take advantage of advanced dyes and cheap paint?

Ipsedixitism’, Safi remembered: the assertion that something is fact just because a single person says so.

The world will pause over a pretty mystery, but hide from an ugly truth.

Every dictionary-maker knew that language would always outpace them, that – as Samuel Johnson had put it – they would be forever chasing the sun.

Shakespeare’s time had been one of lexical effusiveness, when language was springy and daring, producing words as modern sounding as ‘banana’ and as steeped in time as ‘overmorrow’.

‘Such an important motivation, guilt, isn’t it? I sometimes envy sociopaths their lack of it.’

It was her own take on the concept of ‘sonder’: the realisation that other people have rich and complicated lives that we will never know.

Her job was to carefully dismantle language like a Russian doll until its very core was revealed, then put it back together to preserve its mystery.

‘We only have this one life, so I want to celebrate existence while I can.