Ifactifice.

I must be a frustrating person to communicate with. I get annoyed over the stupidest things and decide not to write back, just because. Or I don't write back because I feel like it's too important to deal with. (weird, I know.) OR I mean to write back, and I think about what to say so much that I begin to assume I've already written back. The second scenario is the most frustrating. For me, anyway. I want so badly to say the right thing, and I'm so afraid of being uninteresting or unimportant or just.... average. So I find myself disregarding the whole matter entirely, and leaving the people I want to impress hanging. I don't make sense. agh.

There's this passage in Everything is Illuminated (which I finished on the plane to Prague, and which broke my heart into a million pieces, and which changed how I view pretty much everything about writing and storytelling, and which I can't in good conscience recommend but I hypocritically LOVED [and hated, because it was true])... and it talks about words that have been made up for various things. I loved this one.

IFACTIFICE:
Music is beautiful. Since the beginning of time, we (the Jews) have been looking for a new way of speaking. We often blame our treatment throughout history on terrible misunderstandings. (Words never mean what we want them to mean.) If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand. This was the origin of Torah chanting and, in all likelihood, Yiddish - the most onomatopoeic of all languages. It is also the reason that the elderly among us, particularly those who survived a pogrom, hum so often, indeed seem unable to stop humming, seem dead set on preventing any silence or linguistic meaning in. But until we find this new way of speaking, until we can find a nonapproximate vocabulary, nonsense words are the best thing we've got. Ifactifice is one such word.

I wish we could communicate that way.