Adjusting to Amazing

Fiorella has come to terms with "amazing" and "awesome," although they drove her out of her mind at first.  Everyone was using them, especially the vocabulary-challenged home-buyers on HGTV. Everything from floors to ceilings to swimming pools to kitchens to toilets were amazing or awesome. So were beauty-contest winners, actors, politicians, children, pets and God.

But, as a linguist, Fiorella knows that superlatives and emphatics come and go, and many don't even make sense--like "pretty" being used to mean "very"--so she decided to make her peace with the newcomers.

Amazing, right?

Love and Hate

Gramp could be a great guy when he wasn't drinking. Mother said he always cautioned his children against using the word "hate" because it was such a strong word, an admonition which Fiorella took to heart.  Of course, somewhere along the line, Mother also learned that "love" is a weak a word, or, as she told Fio, that one should prove one's love by what one does rather than what one says.

The latter concept, Fiorella totally discarded. She uses the word "love" freely and often

Wordless

Of course, the idea that people think in words is ridiculous.  Every time Fiorella accords her characters interior dialogues, it's fiction.  People think in--well--thoughts, splotches of conjecture, sometimes inspired and immediate, sometimes long and drawn out.  When Fio plots out her romances, she starts with the relationship between the two leads, then opens her mind to whatever would logically follow, then tries to record what her inarticulate brain has told her.  When she is painting, she goes into the zone and lets her hand do the walkin'.  When she encounters life problems, she goes totally cold and lets her id/ego/anima/whatever take over.

Words are an artificial construct that we use to try to communicate the essence of our thoughts, but sometimes they aren't enough. As in the above paragraph.