writer's moll

Water – love looking at it, love reading about it – tales of shipwrecks or unfortunates cast adrift on any old ocean float my boat, but please don’t make me get in it. Once in Mexico, my husband persuaded me that it was worth putting aside my fear for the reward of snorkelling among shoals of gloriously coloured fish, but unfortunately it didn't turn out to be the gentle wade from the beach into the water I'd imagined. We were taken out in a boat and told to swim over to a distant rock. I won’t go into my humiliation that day – just let’s say I panicked (it’s absurd to expect you to breathe, worry about your snorkelling mask and try not to drown at the same time) and had to be towed back to the boat by the young guy in charge of the party. When I was telling someone later how I had jumped off the boat and gone down, down, down, my husband looked amazed and said “no you didn’t, you plopped gently over the side of the boat and bobbed straight back up” – well that's not what it felt like to me and perception is everything.

Words – There’s this giant word warehouse called the English language, the entire contents there for the taking. Some people are content to take out the bare minimum to express themselves, some, not knowing what to do with them, wrestle them into shape like a child using his fists to hammer together an ill-fitting jigsaw puzzle. Others trawl it with skill, or even genius, choosing just the right ones, in just the right quantity and weave them into a masterpiece. But with the right timing and the right celebrity name, you usually only need the most basic language to make the best-seller list.

X-rated films – We had two cinemas in our town when I was young, and as long as one of them was showing a U film there was no problem and not much of one if it was an A – you simply found a sympathetic looking adult, rattled your money so they knew you weren’t looking for a freebie and said “please would you take us in”, but if an X film was showing in both cinemas you were stuffed and went home completely miserable. Looking back, I’ve no idea why we didn’t try to find out what was showing before we went into town.

Youth – Years ago an Italian friend told me a lovely saying they had that sums up the gap between old and young: the young have teeth but no bread and the old, bread but no teeth.

Zealous – why does that word never seem to come along without his mate over? No one is ever under zealous, and rarely just zealous.

Zeugma – meaning the last straw. Okay, it doesn’t, but it was for me when I came across it in a book by William F Buckley Jnr. I was already a bit fed up, after only a couple of chapters, with what seemed like contrived situations just to show off some obscure word he wanted to use (or are they only showing off if you don’t know the word?) and then he hit me with zeugma. I looked it up and found it's: a figure of speech in which a word is used to modify or govern two or more words although appropriate to only one of them or making a different sense with each, as in the sentence Mr Pickwick took his hat and his leave. It’s not really the sort of word you can throw casually into a conversation is it?