A Little OCD?

Aristotle said, "All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire."

I think that for each of us there's at least one thing - be it a craft, a practice, a job in the home or in the marketplace - about which we take excessive care, the abuse or neglect of which by others we find painful to watch. Something we're willing to spend time on and polish until it meets our standards.

(I can't seem to find a word that exactly fits my meaning. Nature, compulsion, and passion all play into it, as does obsession, but none of these describes it perfectly. So, for lack of a better term, I will call it a passion.)

My passion is for words. Language is important to me. The right words in the right order, the mot juste, the neatly turned phrase, are somehow deeply satisfying. I may be a slacker (actually I am a slacker) in many areas - housework, exercise, consistently healthy cooking and eating, keeping in touch with distant family members - but when it comes to words, to language and grammar, I am diligent without trying, often without thinking. It is, indeed, a kind of compulsion.

Words, to me, have individual personalities whose beauty or ugliness extends to their very appearance on the page. Some words are lovely to speak and to see: violet; apple; maiden; apricot. Some are pleasantly exotic - amethyst; silver; mystic; rainbow. Some words are ugly in sound and meaning and look: execrate; vituperate.

Perhaps because of my lingual obsession, I tend to be a literalist. I understand that hyperbole and metaphor exist (and sometimes indulge in them myself), but, in the main, I say exactly what I mean and try to mean exactly what I say. And I tend toward the silly assumption that others want to do the same.

This can and does drive said others crazy - notably Mr. M, who's very fond of what he calls "looking at the big picture". (To me it seems more like sloppy speech.) Poor husband of a word-wrangling wife, how he hates being pinned down to a precise expression of his meaning. He'd much rather keep his communication vague and fuzzy, all the while hoping for the best (which, now that I think about it, rather describes my approach to housework).

Of course Mr. M has his own passions, the greatest of which is probably the proper building and maintenance of bicycles. A frame built on bad geometrical principles, or a poorly-tuned bicycle, are as exasperating to him as a poorly-constructed sentence or misplaced apostrophe are to me.

I suppose that in a perfect world, our passions, or talents, would become our vocations - in short, we'd all get paid for doing what we naturally do best. As it is, we must satisfy ourselves where we can, by living up to our own standards - and remembering that what's important to one may be less so to another. (Although nothing can excuse a misplaced apostrophe.)

What's your passion?

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