The Word Eater

Barlow ate his words. Sometimes he would go to great lengths and lovingly prepare them with tasty sauces made of the ripest adverbs or aged adjectives. Preparation time would not be rushed so the flavor of each letter could be coaxed out and blended with the others in a savory olio. On these occasions, Barlow would uncork a bottle of his favorite sharps and flats, let it sit for a half hour while he plated his expressive meal, and then pour a glass of music to moisten his palate and aid in word digestion.
There were other times when Barlow could not delay his hunger, and he would randomly pick a book off a shelf and stuff his face like he was eating a bag of potato chips. His cheeks would puff with salty verbs and crisp nouns.
Barlow began eating words when he was nine-years-old. His parents bought him a set of encyclopedias, and one day, he nibbled the “ed” off the word “waited.” From that small beginning, Barlow developed a taste for morphemes such as “the,” or “write,” or “man,” and would pop them into his mouth whenever hunger struck.
In high school, Barlow began to broaden his palate; he dined on nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, modifiers and pronouns as often as possible. He learned French and Spanish and delighted at the flavors masculine and feminine articles could bring out in words. But, it wasn’t until he enrolled in college that Barlow’s etyomological pursuits blossomed into an epicurean obsession.
Barlow enrolled at the University of Texas as an English major. He soon discovered his favorite subjects were Literary Theory and Creative Writing. In the literary theory course, a new world opened up to him, a world of neologisms and the portmanteau. His theory professors unlocked secret recipes and offered up rare delicacies reserved for a cadre of intellectuals and competitive theorists. He wandered through the gourmet kitchens of the academic elite tasting delicious sophistry, philosophy, pseudo-expressions and nonce words, never missing an opportunity to nosh and nibble at the kitchen table. Some of the offerings were hard to swallow, but Barlow found that with a healthy swig of bubbling water, he could get even the most distasteful lexemes down.
The word eater also took classes in foreign languages to broaden his lexicon. He mastered Greek, Latin, Russian, German, Chinese, Chinese and Arabic, adding grams to his brain weight with each new dictionary. His head began to swell.
The words Barlow had eaten served him well as a writer. By age 20 he had turned out a 700-page novel, by 23, a non-fiction text on 13th-century vocabularians. He would lace his work with new words, words he coined to fit his thoughts; they proved to be the most tasty he had ever eaten.
In his last year of grad school, while completing his thesis, Barlow the word eater suffered a massive brain injury. The Finnish and Icelandic languages proved to be his undoing. His thesis, “Culinary Linguistics of Frigid People,” required that he learn those languages. A three–month diet of alphabets with strange, pointed letters surrounded by dots and squiggles tore several blood vessels in his brain, and it began to hemorrhage. Syntax began to leak from his ears, half-chewed Finnish surnames ran blood-red from his nose, and he fell into a coma. An international team of respected linguistic professors was flown in to try to resuscitate him, but their mission ended in failure. Barlow died.
At Barlow’s funeral, his younger brother Chet delivered the eulogy. Obviously distraught, Chet stepped to the podium and said, “There are no words to express our sorrow.”

(c) 2007