I learned the word “bespoke” today, after reading TheYetter’s review of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and it instantly became my favorite word. (According to the Oxford English Dictionary it is used with reference to goods and means “ordered to be made, as distinguished from READY-MADE; also said of a tradesman who makes goods to order.”) The following are a few of the reasons for my newfound love:
- it begins with “be-”, not in the sense of the word “begin” but in the medieval intensifier attitude of “beloved”;
- it has a long vowel that ends in a K sound which sounds wonderful—like “yoke” or “ache”—especially when tumbling from the lips of a girl who from time to time speaks English as it should be spoken;
- it contains the word “spoke,” which is a rich word both because it could mean “speaking”—an excellent pastime—and it could refer to the axes of a wheel which fascinate as they distribute weight across the circumference of the circle (intuitive theoretically of course but always, it seems to me, slightly out of whack with our often linear habits);
- in FACT, while drawing upon the conversational meaning, it uses “to speak” in quite an odd, kind of imperative way;
- it is (I hope anyway for my own sense of peace, pride, and prejudice) an esoteric bit of jargon which automatically initiates anyone who knows it into a philological fraternity;
- that fraternity is totally superficial (ha!) and, if I understand its scope, pretty much pertains to clothes;
- it kicks the shit out of the much more denotative “custom-made”; and
- what could possibly be better than something personal anyway?
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