Ian Warden: Imbroglios leave me lost for words

But no. It isn't. Twice in recent days - the first time because of powerful feelings set jostling in my bosom by The Ashes stumping imbroglio - I've searched in vain for words that capture those feelings.

The other occasion, just two days before the bosom-perturbing events at Lords, was hearing the playing on ABC Radio National of an October 2001 recording of then-prime minister John Howard at his slimy, amoral, Machiavellian worst.

Howard was deeply unpleasant throughout his prime ministership but hit his peak nastyartfulness (see what I've done there, inventing a word defining an abominable act that combines nastiness and artfulness, where the dictionary doesn't have an existing word that wields a matter?) with the Children Overboard imbrogliodeceitdisgrace.

There, again, I've needed to invent a new compound word for a disgraceful imbroglio verminous with Howard government deceits.

There is a new book out about Australia's maltreatments of refugee children and the Children Overboard disgrace looms large in it. Radio National's Philip Adams' interview with its author Dr Jordana Silverstein was illustrated with a clip of Howard at the time claiming that vile boat-people-refugees had thrown their children overboard.

The incident showed, Howard slitherslimed (there I am again, inventing a necessary, appropriate word), that to be capable of such murderous cruelty towards littlies, these refugee child-tossers were callous foreign vermin of a kind Australians abhor. He and his manly government would never allow these refugee filth to contaminate our beloved land, Howard promised.

Professor Silverstein and her book are scathing about what Howard did (of course no refugee children had been thrown overboard) and why he did it (to appeal to the naive and ugly worst in Australian voters).

But here I am carrying on like a pork chop, for everything about Children Overboard still has the power to distress and the ABC radio item of Howard's artful anti-refugee remarks shivers any decent person's decency timbers. Today's theme is supposed to be words, and how inadequate they often are.

The Jonny Bairstow stumping imbroglio and the Children Overboard reprise have somehow left me (me, an agile wordmonger with a 50,000-plus word arsenal!) fumingly lost for the right words to write and to say.

The Bairstow imbroglio (I take the unpatriotic but ethical view that his stumping was shameful) mixes an unusual cauldron of emotions.

There are assorted kinds of deep patriotic, moral and sporting disappointments (for example how disappointing that the Australian players showed a depraved John Howardesque amoral opportunism) for which there are no well-fitting words.

One mumbles and stutters weary old overused words like "disgrace" and "shame" and "depravity" but they haven't the nuances one needs.

Of course there is a cerebral school of thought that words can never be enough. The famous notion that "Talking about music is as pointless as dancing about architecture" has an essential truth to it.

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The toweringly wise and prolific author Italo Calvino, with no illusions about his craft, says that as soon as one begins to write an experience down, one begins to distort and spoil that experience.

Calvino is probably right but then, wistfully, one thinks of some of those fabulous-looking and fabulous-sounding compound nuance-capturing words in languages other than English, wishing and hoping that English wordmongers might be so inventive.

There are some German beauties.

The German "torschlusspanik" I see defined and explained as "this beautiful word used to refer to the feeling you experience at a certain point in your life where you see an imaginary door closing on all your opportunities, and you wonder what could have been. Tor means 'gate', schluss means 'closing' or 'ending', and panik means, 'panic'."

There is an attractively unpronounceable and almost untranslatable Finnish word "mythpe" I find explained as "The experiencing of a shared embarrassment or shame when seeing someone else do something embarrassing. My means 'we', myt means 'with' and hpe is 'shame', so it can be roughly translated to mean a kind of 'co-embarrassment'."

Perhaps those of us Australians, shamed-embarrassed by the Bairstow stumping, are suffering a kind of co-shame-embarrassment for which the famously literary Finns have a word but we haven't.

Feelings of shame and embarrassment are not quite the same emotions but they are cousins and are sometimes blended in our hearts and so a word that blends them is a valuable tool for thinkers, talkers and writers.

I wonder, worrying, what words those of us who had yearned for a "yes" in October's Voice referendum will find to express our complicated sorrow (commixed with disappointment in and rage against our fellow but misguidedly No-voting Australians) when, as seems increasingly likely, the Nation votes "no"?

Methinks, braced for that "no" and for the need there will be to try to talk and write about the dismay and heartbreak it will bring, we are not going to find in English the words our dismayed and disappointed hearts and minds will need.

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