Loquacious: "Eulogy of a Word" by Angela Sparandera
Friday, August 16, 2013 at 2:01PM 
Loquacious is an essay series that explores and revels in language. Read other installments here.
When I think of Angela Sparandera, this week's Loquacious guest, several "f" words come to mind: friendly, funny, and frank. She's an engaging writer who takes on the kind of real-life emotions and situations that a lot people shy away from, and she presents them with vulnerability, humor, and, ultimately, deep kindness. She is a wonderfully human (and humane) writer. In this essay she tackles a particular "f" word that's she's ready to put to rest.
Eulogy of a Word
By Angela Sparandera
We are gathered here together today, on my behalf, to say goodbye to a word that was once an integral portion of my past vocabulary. A word that I chose to define myself for so long. I have decided to retire this word from my repertoire with much thought and respect to its classic definition.
Fat, by its dictionary description is "Well filled out. Thick. Well-stocked. Swollen." But to me, it was a portrayal of myself as a singular piece of person. Fat was both an enemy and a crutch. I chose to let this one word describe the very essence of myself; not smart, of funny or caring or artistic. I was fat. And I let that be the most substantial part of me.
Fat was the one word I dreaded to hear as I walked down the hallways in middle school, waiting for the class bully to look at my body in disgust and snarl the word to his friends. Fat was the word I waited to hear whispered behind my back as I sat down in class, the L-shaped metal bar digging into my side. Fat is the one word that can unravel me into a crying child, void of all the confidence, pride, and self-worth I have worked so hard for.
It is with much contemplation that I nix this word from my arsenal of adjectives. I am done hanging out with fat as a way to define who I am.
What's funny is that I hate saying fat as much as I hate hearing it. For a word that has saddled up so closely to me over the years, I am even uncomfortable typing it now. It’s a word of crazed taboo. Fat is the one word nobody wants to hear but everyone is thinking when they see a well-filled out, thick, well-stocked, swollen person in their eye range. It becomes not an adjective, but a perverted thought meant to judge and size-up someone's worth.
If we break it down, fat, really, is not meant as a word to be upset about. It's just an adjective describing something of large stature. Fat, I believe, did not mean to be so negative. It was us who made it a monster, blowing it up into the very thing people do not wish to see themselves as. And for those who are, we collectively stamp them with this label of a word and leave them with those three letters of shame. Fat has become fat itself.
In my current life, I choose not to use this word any more. I choose to put fat back where it originally belongs and will continue henceforth to use it only as a surface remark with no secret agenda hidden behind it. In fact, there may never be a reason to use it again at all.
I’m sorry to have to make this so morbid, killing off a word in public, but I need this closure. Fat and I will go our separate ways, no matter what I look like. And if the word should creep its way back onto my tongue somehow, I will try my best to acknowledge its presence and set it free, like a specter of the past that lingers its way through homes and cemeteries, hoping to relive its original glory. I won't give it that.
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Angela Sparandera has since chosen the word fantastic to refer to herself and continues to search for other swell adjectives to use. You can find similar essays of hers on Connotation Press, where she was recently published, or on her weekly blog, In the Land of Twenty: Perspectives on a Confusing Decade.
Angela and fat have not spoken since the publication of this essay.
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