Presto — by Amy LeachEARLY ON, there was no word for “groundhog.” Neither were there groundhogs, or grandmothers, or event coordinators. There were events but they were uncoordinated like the Tunguska Event. There was nothing, but no word for it. In some ways it must have been nice, all that wordlessness, because sometimes now you meet somebody and all you can think is, Please stop talking. Our planet has become so much wordier than the other planets, although there are respites if you hang out with eagles or angels. Eagles never explain anything, and angels are no more voluble than they are visible: visibility is not their shtick.
But once in a while you meet a visible voluble being and you think, Please do not stop talking. This would never happen on Neptune. Also, with all the flowers and words for flowers, we can indulge in wildflower gossip, about how the golden alexanders are bolting, how the tansies are being insubordinate again, how the mad apples are creeping up on the obedient plant, how the purple archangel was boogying in the wind last night. (The purple archangel is anomalously visible.)
Wildflower scandals are talkable things. There are talkable things and untalkable things, just like there are beable things and unbeable things, though not everybody knows this. First-graders want to be beable things—astronauts and firefighters—when they grow up, but children in nursery school want to be owls and cars and sandwiches. They are expatriates from somewhere far-out, and they are still trying to talk about untalkable things, like: How fast is time? What is time plus time? How many jiffies in an hour, how many soons in an afternoon? How many fasts does it take to make a slow?
https://orionmagazine.org/article/presto/
(Busby Berkeley sunflowers)
