Let Spring be for Smooshing Together

It’s after Easter now, so, being a pastor’s wife, I feel a certain degree of liberation. Not all out dancing-in-the-streets kind of liberation, mind you, but the air feels somehow lighter now. There are still sharp contrasts, lines of demarcation everywhere I look— my bread and butter, after all. This week, though, I’m freeing myself from those. In fact, giddy with spring perhaps, I’m rejoicing about things that come together in unforeseen ways. And, oddly enough, these things I’m going to rejoice about are really just words.

The other day, driving to work, I heard an NPR story that fit in perfectly with the main theme of this blog. The piece, by Nina Totenberg, was titled “Birth Control at the Supreme Court: Does Free Coverage Violate Religious Freedom?” It begins this way:

The rights of the religious and the secular clash again Wednesday at the Supreme Court, this time in the controversial context of Obamacare and birth control.

Ah, nothing new about this kind of clashing— it’s become about as common as the sound of cymbals in the back of a school orchestra. You probably heard something about this case: a place called “The Little Sisters of the Poor” – a home for the elderly in Washington D.C. which is run by an order of nuns – objects on religious grounds to having to provide birth control coverage to all of its employees. The federal government is proposing a solution that would require the management simply to fill out some kind of form stating that their institution wants to “opt out.” They would be allowed to have nothing to do with this coverage; but—and here’s the catch– something would be done, separately, so that those employees could receive the services through another insurer. The problem is, apparently, that this kind of “opt out” doesn’t have enough clout; the organization would, in their view, still be somehow complicit in the process.

All of this is definitely compelling stuff, especially for a pastor’s wife always alert to matters of religion in society, and it held my attention all the way through. But something else—a single word—suddenly propelled itself to the top of my list of what would be memorable about this case.

That word was “workaround.”

Nina Totenberg used it throughout her story, and indeed the concept was central to what the story was about. Now I’m a pretty savvy words person, but I don’t think this one has ever trotted by me in full plumage before. When I went to investigate its origin, I found that it started in the high tech world. Figures, right? Here’s the definition that Wikipedia offers:

A workaround is a bypass of a recognized problem in a system. A workaround is typically a temporary fix that implies that a genuine solution to the problem is needed. But workarounds are frequently as creative as true solutions, involving outside the box thinking in their creation.

This is pretty fabulous—a detour that’s about as good as the route you were originally going to take! The only thing is, even though this definition has a positive connotation, you’ve got to admit that the way the word sounds is a little suspect. I mean, “workaround” doesn’t exactly conjure up an image of some smart engineer type in Silicon Valley sitting up straight and fulfilling a highly technical calling. I’m more apt to hear it keeping company with “hang around” or “lie around” and envisage somebody in a dark basement doing not much of anything. In any case, I began seeing workarounds everywhere – out on the trails, while doing housework, you name it.

How about that fight in the Supreme Court over Obamacare, contraceptives and religious freedom? It’s still vitally important, absolutely. But that story, for me, was a kind of launching pad to an exploration of a bunch of other fabulous nouns in the same general family as “workaround.”

There’s the very similar “turnaround” of course:

Then, and unfortunately we have to put up with a dash here, there’s a “go-between.” I can’t easily show you a picture of someone being an intermediary for two other people, so I’ll give you this exciting one instead:

One of my personal favorites is something that’s in our own shed; my husband uses it quite a bit for outdoor work like tightening cables. How can you not absolutely love something that’s called a “come-along?”

Now, wait a minute, the computer just made me put in that hyphen! I swear the word often goes without it! In case you haven’t had the pleasure of using one, or seeing your spouse use one, it’s defined as a “hand-operated winch with a ratchet used to pull objects.” Ok, maybe this doesn’t sound very exciting, but the word itself transports me in an instant to a person walking at first alone through a field who is then glad to be joined by a companion or an eager dog.

And then there’s the word we just learned over at our neighbors’ house a couple of weeks ago. You won’t believe this one: ever heard of a “gazinta”?  I didn’t think so. Sounds like something you might say after somebody sneezes. No picture available here; I’ll let you use your imagination on this one, but Urban Dictionary might help.

The current (March/April 2016) edition of the magazine Poets & Writers includes an interview with the writer Jhumpa Lahiri, mostly about why she wanted to write a book completely in Italian. At one point, she says:

Everything in my life, from the very beginning, was and is and shall be some kind of mixture, some kind of hybrid, some kind of hyphenated something. (p.40)

Well, maybe since it’s spring, we can go wild and toss out those hyphens, and let the smooshing together be complete. And that, in a certain way, could even bring us back to the Supreme Court case…