Words By Whittall

  “It’s just one word!” Lisette hissed, her eyebrows scrunched together, her cheeks flushed. She was angry, I knew, but not at me.   At life and at her growing inability to put a name to a simple object. Words had always been so important to us. Our friendship was built on words, and, later, our lives and livelihoods. Within weeks of meeting, we became each other’s thesauri. We spent a lot of time and energy in those pre-Google days determining the proper plural of thesaurus. Once we concluded that either would suffice, we chose to stick with the one we liked best, deciding also that the plural of phallus was phalli and doofus, doofi.   By the second year of college, we were roommates, and a Saturday morning ritual began. A steaming pot of coffee. A fresh pack of cigarettes and empty ashtray each. A Scrabble board laid out on the kitchen table with our hefty stack of dictionaries and thesauri. One of us would declare, “I’m going to whoop your ass!” and the game would begin. More