Mwah mwah, mwah-wah-wah-wah

Today, I have been pondering on words. Have you ever repeated a word over and over again in your head until it loses all meaning? Try it. Pick a word—any common, everyday word will do. How about “cupcake”? A cupcake, a luscious chocolate cupcake, covered with shiny, fudgy ganache. Mmmm.

Of course, the word cupcake isn’t a cupcake. It’s just an alphabetic symbol for cupcake. The word could be anything—it could be cowpie. If we, as English speakers, were told from the beginning that the word “cowpie” meant a delicious fudgy dessert (ewww), that’s what it would mean.

Okay, now just repeat the word over and over again. Cupcake, cupcake, cupcake. Say it out loud, whisper it, shout it, chant it silently in your head. Pretty soon, it’s just a combination of meaningless sounds. It’s the adults in a Peanuts cartoon who all say the same thing: “Mwah mwah, mwah-wah-wah-wah.” The mental picture of a tasty treat that matched “cupcake”? Gone with the wind.

I know what you’re thinking. “Okay, minion,” you’re thinking, “so what does this have to do with your idiot boss?” I’m getting to that.

The Voice of Reason stumbled into my office late last week looking dazed and seeking succor. I ushered her to a chair and gave her a nice cool drink. After sipping delicately, and dabbing her brow with a linen handkerchief, she felt enough like herself that she could speak.

“minion,” she said, taking a deep breath, “I think I just had an out of body experience. No, that’s not the right phrase. It was a waking hallucination. Is that possible?”

I asked her if she had been taking LSD or smoking pot. She insisted that her urine would pass the most stringent drug test (administered randomly under the Devil’s new intolerance policy). Given her sober-as-a-judgeness (well, more sober than Paula Abdul, anyway), I told her that a waking hallucination seemed kind of unlikely. I also asked her to describe what had occurred.

She told me that she was trapped in the Devil’s office, listening to a lecture about paper in the fax machine. The lecture was entering its second millenium when (dramatic chords) something happened.

Suddenly, she couldn’t hear the Devil’s words. The drone continued, but the words were indistinguishable. Oh, his lips were still moving, but instead of symbols encoded with meaning, there was just—sound. But that’s not all.

She realized that she could see the words coming out of the Devil’s mouth. One after another. Eighty-word-long sentences with each new word tumbling over the last. Some of the words were italicized; some were bolded or underlined, some were in fun fonts. Regardless, they just kept coming.

She said the torrent of words began to fill the empty air space in the office. Letters were knotted together like the legs of a dead spider. She watched in a kind of fascinated horror as words began to lean against the walls, black snowdrifts of vowels and consonants, new letters causing the old to shift and slide in a language avalanche.

Finally, she said, there was a pause. Without the influx of additional words, the air between herself and the Devil cleared sufficiently that she could see him again. The view was partially obscured by some of the Devil’s last few words floating in the air: “debacle” and “one fell swope.” [Note: This is how he says it. “Swope.” Not “swoop.”]

The Voice of Reason was feeling anything but reasonable. She waved her hand in what she hoped was a casual manner, trying to gain a few seconds to think. Then she saw, and actually understood, his last three words: “Don’t you agree?” She was gripped with horror: Agree with what?

Sitting in my office, regaining her shattered composure, the Voice of Reason says she has no idea what she had said in response to the Devil’s question. All she knew at that time was that she was trapped in the apex of Hell, and twenty minutes of the Devil’s words were nothing more than letters. She could still vaguely perceive them melting into the plush saxony that covers the Devil’s floor. Whatever she said, it was sufficient to merit her release from his office. (Of course, it could have been the whimpering. She’s pretty sure there was whimpering.)

I comforted the Voice as best I could. Ultimately, she was able to repair to her own office to lick her wounds.

In the end, it was a sobering experience for both of us, because it was confirmed that , in the Devil's hands, words can be wounding. It really makes me wonder, though. When Eve stood by that tree, gazing at the tempting crimson fruit, did the Devil's words really persuade her to eat the apple? Or did they just overwhelm her, confuse her, lose their meaning, until all she could hear was "mwah mwah, mwah-wah-wah-wah"?