Hello,
It’s Love Reading Club time again. Paid subscribers to Love Letter are invited to join us on 7 March at 3pm to respond to this month’s essay at our little reading circle here in Cape Town. Sorry if you’re too far, but I’d urge to read the essay Dwelling at the Threshold by Indra Wussow anyway, because it is an expansive and stimulating read.
If you’d like to join us, please DM me your WhatsApp number so I can send the meeting details to you.
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Needing the best insult
‘Pusillanimous little turd’, I called him.
Not to his face. On WhatsApp, to my friend, who had had an intellectual run-in with this man spewing (not unusually), his terrible (and dangerous) ignorance with his (usual) cocky swagger.
I’d already insulted him in various other monosyllabic, run-of-the-mill ways available to a woman who likes to swear and has low tolerance for a certain kind of intellectual arrogance, but when I’d heard how he’d backed out of the argument without conceding one millimetre to my better-read friend who had supplied the correct information, I somehow lugged ‘Pusillanimous little turd’ from the depths of my disgust.
And, whoa, was that satisfying!
Good old rock-solid Anglo-Saxon words are almost always a better choice when you’re a writer but a long and lofty sounding English word hauled up through the ages and stages from Latin or Greek, can be so pleasing in certain circumstances.
