'Flavor Grown, Taste the Difference' and I tasted one of the peaches from the bag and it was dry, woody, tasteless. I know peaches are tricky fruit and that something has to be put on packages beyond the simple name of the product. But everything, it seems, asserts itself as special, freely ransacking the language for whatever words will make that point. Everything down at Baby Nat's is 'sugar sweet' automatically.
When I want to use some of these glamour words I have to question, 'What kind of company have you been keeping? You conjured up your power of evocation over what kind of products?' They may have become a little beaten down and hard.
Is there no word in the language safe from the predations of the advertisers? Certainly no single syllable one. Any special word I find, any that's precise and powerful I treasure and use sparingly like a chemist adding a reagent drop by drop. Even then, I frequently find that hoarded word has become the talk of the town.
Locals must feel often this way: the places of special meaning ringed with tour buses. If it's in the dictionary, it's common property, so not always treated gently or with respect.
Still there are words, Lost Beauties of the English Language, to use the title of the book by Charles Mackay, not yet rediscovered besides archaic meaning dropped from usage. In them we may take fresh and succulent lisse in the language. ('Oh, Lord of life and light, / Of lisse and payne.' Piers Ploughman).
By the by, the second peach was yummy.
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