The Right Phrase

I've never taken a writing class of any kind: creative, journalism, or whatever the course catalog might have, I've never taken it. This might be because my formal education didn't advance too far after high school, having coasted to a halt sometime before my 20th birthday, brought on by a mixture of calculus and beer. At this point, I'm hardly upset about it.

But I do wonder how things might be taught in such settings. I like to think I'd love to hear of an instructor who illustrates searching for the correct word. Or words to describe something. Perhaps they'd use Mark Twain's famous quote that the difference between the wrong word and the right one is the same as the difference between a lightning bug and lightning.

But that doesn't illustrate an example. It was quite a few years ago that I was reading Ira Berkow's biography of the sports writer Red Smith and how Red tried to capture the exact essence of what it was he was trying to say, by looking for just the right way to say it. Red was Mr. Berkow's mentor, so the story is a highly appreciative example of searching for accuracy.

Red apparently wrote something that conveyed the look of disgust on someone's face, as if they had just bitten into an apple and found half a worm. Easy to imagine what that look might be. Lightening.

The editor changed it to: having just bitten into an apple and found a worm. Not even a bug that lights. Red went nuts. (The editor, whoever it was, likely didn't ever get the Pulitzer that Red later earned.)

The image of someone's face being so scrunched up after finding half a worm in an apple they've just taken a bite of has always stayed with me. Saying they made a face like they just bit into a lemon is good, but who the hell actually bites into a lemon other than someone's foreign uncle? The facial reaction should be no surprise if you're chomping into a lemon with your eyes open. Half a worm is a surprise.

I've never tried to seek a better phrase for facial disgust. But I have to say, one found me. It is predicated on knowing a little criminal history, but it's an easy topper to half a worm found in a freshly bitten-into apple.

It's been over 20 years since Jeffrey Dahmer was finally arrested for intensely brutal serial slayings, made even grislier by cannibalism of the body parts. Perhaps not surprisingly, he was killed in jail not long after being incarcerated. But now there is a documentary in theaters, 'The Jeffrey Dahmer Files' that has been released. The film centers on recollections of those who worked the case, and those who lived near Mr. Dahmer in Milwaukee.

I wonder if this will ever will ever make it into a classroom as an illustration of carefully describing facial disgust. In the documentary, there is a neighbor who recalls Mr. Dahmer before his apprehension as a friendly man who he regrettably accepted a sandwich from.

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