“Word of the Week” is a biweekly column by Allie Gruber about the joy of language. Every fortnight, she will choose one unusual word or group of words that tingled her ears and widened her eyes. She advises readers to pepper their day-to-day conversations with her selections. Everyone likes a bit of seasoning.
Life consists of many pleasures. Dancing. Eating. Cracking knuckles. Wearing polka-dot wellies on a rainy day. Tackling your gangly nine-year-old cousin in a game of rugby. Admiring your “gainz” in the mirror after a strenuous set of reps. Sitting in a shopping cart as your groovy leather-jacket-clad mother wheels you through the stationery aisle of Stop & Shop. The list goes on.
But some pleasures don’t require a nine-year-old cousin or a forty-pound dumbbell or even a trendy mother. Walking, for example. Walking! Who wouldn’t enjoy a nice long stroll along the Charles River on a nippy February afternoon? Who wouldn’t relish the tingly satisfaction of hearing the crunch of autumn leaves underfoot? Who could possibly say no to taking a turn about the drawing room on the arm of the most amiable young lad in Hertfordshire? Not to mention the health benefits. “The multifaceted benefits of walking for healthy aging,” trumpets the National Institute of Health. Or, as Mayo Clinic so delicately puts it, “Walking: Trim your waistline, improve your health.”
And yet! Walk is one of the most overused words in the English language. “I’m sorry I’m late, Professor,” flustered Meredith might cry, sweat dripping from her nose onto her Gazelles. “I had to walk all the way from Science Hill to this wee classroom near Pierson College.” Boring! Bland! Banal! Being late is bad enough, but to select a word as remarkably unremarkable as walk? Inexcusable. Poor Meredith could have hurtled down Science Hill. She could have been hustling, or flurrying, or scurrying. Heavens, she could have been careening so fast that she tripped and gashed her right knee on a slab of concrete! But no. None of these possibilities crossed her mind. Like so many of us, Meredith reached for the lowest-hanging fruit. Walking. At the very least, she deserves detention.
Perhaps the finest alternative to “walking” is footslogging. “Oh, stop dragging your feet as if you’ve been footslogging for fifty miles!” Mrs. Hodgebert might say to little Stevie, lifting her three layers of petticoats out of the mud. “We’ve only been at it for twenty minutes. Put some pep in your step!” The charm of “footslogging” lies in the way its sound aligns perfectly with its meaning. The “sl-” evokes other gloriously ugly words. Slouch. Sludge. Slaughter.
But little Stevie doesn’t give in. “I’m not footslogging, mamá!” he squeals, wiping his snotty nose with his right palm. “I’m ambling. I’m rambling along at my leisure.” His mother sighs, shakes her head. Louder, obstinately, Stevie pipes up again: “I’m taking my time. I’m dawdling.” Then, in his best attempt at a French accent: “I’m being a flâneur.” Mrs. Hodgebert snorts. In case you didn’t know, reader, flâneurs were 19th-Century French gentlemen who roamed the streets of Paris observing their fellow countrymen. The word, derived from the French verb flâner, “to stroll,” summons the image of a top-hatted, pointy-nosed gentleman with an umbrella tucked under his arm. It certainly doesn’t apply to little Stevie, with his spaghetti-stained T-shirt and spittle dribbling from his chin. “You? A flâneur?” Mrs. Hodgebert peers at her son through her low, narrow spectacles. “I think not!” With that she tugs on his snotty palm and whisks him up the muddy hill.
Or, if elegance doesn’t come naturally to you, the verb “toddle” may be your friend. The loveliness of “toddle” lies in this: it doesn’t ask to be taken seriously. Place it in the most serious of sentences, and it will stick out like a sore thumb. “I toddled to my court hearing, anxiously awaiting the jury’s verdict.” You what? Your listener will cry out. You’re telling me that on the most important day of your life, you merely toddled? Bollocks! What makes “toddle” more alluring is that it rhymes with a set of verbs that similarly prompt a cheeky grin on the part of any listener. “Be careful not to knock over my grandfather as you hasten to the dessert station,” a bride might announce to her wedding guests. “He dodders so feebly, poor thing. Any day now he’ll have to start using a walking stick!”
Or perhaps “waddling” is your preferred mode of walking. No need to feel ashamed! You may be one of those lads with a long torso and short legs. Lionel Messi meets the King penguins in National Geographic. “I was waddling across the road,” you might say, sitting with a colleague over post-work beers. “When a car came blasting past—whoosh!—and nearly ran me over! A miracle I’m still alive.” At this your colleague will gasp in astonishment, beer trickling down his stubbly chin. “So I hobbled off and thanked the mysterious universe for keeping me alive,” you conclude, your short legs dangling from the bar stool.
And if you’ve drunk rather too much Guiness and you’re heading home from the pub with your rosy-faced, lacy-bonneted wife? You’d galumph alongside her. “Galumph” is a marvelous word that means, essentially, hoofing along clumsily like an uncoordinated donkey. It’s a near relative of all sorts of charming verbs that also suggest a lack of refined grace. “Stop staggering beside me like a fool!” your wife might cry, her rosy face darkening to scarlet. You lean into her affectionately, but with more force than her frilly self can handle. Together, you topple to the ground. “Cormac!” she shrieks. “I already told your folks I was gon’ marry you. Can’t go back on me word now, can I?” You reach out your hand as if to caress her cheek. “Come now, Lucy goose,” you venture. “I’m not staggering, nor am I lurching or lumbering or blundering. I’m just trudging home, nice and peaceful.” It’s no use. Lucy’s had enough. “To think that I’ll be stuck with you for another fifty years!” she cries. And with that she hustles home and leaves you whimpering and simpering on the ground.
Italy is the perfect place to smuggle these word-gems into your vernacular. “I’m off to take a passeggiata along the Arno,” you might announce to your dinner companions over spaghetti all’Arrabiatta. “Passegiata,” a near relative of the French equivalent “promenade,” is as romantic a word as you’ll ever find. Tell a friend that you pottered around the streets of Florence, and she’ll smile faintly. But tell her that you moseyed through the Piazza della Signoria on your daily 9PM passeggiata, and she’ll pucker her lips, toss back her head, and cry out, “Deary me, Lilian, how jealous I am!” (Note: You might even consider booking a holiday to Italy so that you can drop these verbs nonchalantly into your vocabulary.)
The English language graces us with an abundance of verbs that describe the act of getting from A to B. Many of these words rhyme: waddling and toddling, tottering and doddering, ambling and rambling, straggling and staggering. To use the most prosaic of these verbs is to overlook this diversity, this richness, this treasure-hoard. “Walk” is a perfectly average word. Practical, yes. Accurate? Certainly. Specific? Doubtful. Playful? Not a smidge. And should one ever shrink from an opportunity to be playful? No! Absolutely not! Never.
