1. We tend to use the word “bitter” to denote taste, temperature, or feeling. Often, though not always, bitterness carries a negative charge, bringing us into proximity with a mostly undesirable set of feelings or experiences. Perhaps like jealousy, one doesn’t aspire toward bitterness in one’s inner life, relational world, emotional wheelhouse, etc.
2. In common parlance, the word is familiar and mundane: bitter greens, a bitter wind blew all night. Sometimes we might say or hear someone else say, “the bitter truth,” or “it’s been a bitter struggle for years,” to characterize a particular history. Again, one to which we may not aspire.
3. Interestingly, the word “bitter” comes to us in English by way of the Old English root “biter,” meaning “having a harsh taste, sharp, cutting; angry, full of animosity; cruel,” and from “bitan,” meaning, quite literally, “to bite.” Bitter thus situates us firmly in the mouth, between tongue and teeth, if we weren’t convinced of that already.
4. And further yet in the mouth, via the wonderful compound “bittersweet.” I love to imagine the first user of the word “bittersweet,” whichever clever soul thought to meld these two seemingly unlike pieces of clay together and make of them a union. And in that union of word, sensation, syllabics—a field of new resonance (and consonance!) breaks open.
5. I remember the first time someone offered me the word “bittersweet” as I searched for a way to express how I felt about leaving home, a thing I’ve done many times over the course of my life. Perhaps the thing I’ve done most over the course of my life, which began on a small Mediterranean island and has now rooted across several continents, coasts, cities, and languages. And how like a gift it felt, at age eight or eleven or nineteen, (and again soon, now in my thirties) to accept this perfect palimpsest that slides so snugly over me. How the eyes of my heart lift, blinking, yes bittersweet, and how I wriggle into bittersweet like it’s a scratchy wool hat knitted for me by a friend.
6. That’s it. Sad and sweet. Awful and lovely. Unbearable and joyful, all at once, being alive. Which, for further reading, see Zadie Smith’s essay Joy and more precisely her definition of joy as “that strange admixture of terror, pain, and delight” we are tasked with figuring out how to withstand. Bittersweet: simultaneous, paradoxical, poetic, delicious. Of chocolate, of endings and goodbyes, of all the parting is such sweet sorrow that we do in this life together. That is this life together.
7. Further still, if we look closely, as we must, we find that like so many words, inside of the word bitter is the carrying of a smaller, perhaps less decisive (and divisive!) word: bit. Which, too, reminds me that etymology—in addition to a linguistic discipline—is also a study of history and family, a site of story, ancestry, migrations, and maps. Each route through and inside of language taking us deeper into a kernel, reminding us who and what came before, who and what we share. Each word an origin story mothering another inside.
8. And so like the oft cited and infamous matryoshka doll, we have now unfastened “bitter” and discovered “bit”: particle. small unit or fragment. drill bit. mouthpiece of the horse’s bridle. Bitty, itsy-bitsy spider. Bitmap (a literal map of bits!) And if we follow the map of bits further, we stumble to the sea with the term, “bitter end,” which is the part of a cable wound about the bitts when a ship is at anchor. When the cable is let out to the bitter end, there’s no more left to play.
9. But here on land, there is plenty more to play. In French, the language of the colonizers of my mother’s country, Lebanon, the word for bitter is “amère,” which carries at least two other words within: mer (sea) and mère (mother). And so we re-enter the realm of mothers and seas. Which perhaps are one in the same. Which probably brings us right back to sweetness and sorrow and passage across land and water and loss, and while we’re on the way—love. As it happens, one of the roots (or routes) in the French word “amère” is the Latin word amāre, meaning, “to love” or “to like.”
10. Now that I’m looking very closely, as I must, “amère”(bitter) is just a few letters away from “amour” and “aimer”—love and to love, respectively.
11. In Arabic, the native language of my aforementioned mother, the word for bitter is an auntie to the French “amère.” It is written, مرّ , which can be roughly approximated in English as “murr,” close to myrrh (of frankincense and myrrh). The word “myrrh” corresponds to the Semitic root م ر ر (m-r-r) and was used in the Ancient Greek myth of Myrrha, mother of Adonis, who was turned into a Myrrh tree as punishment for her “unconventional” desires. We know the story.
12. Strangely, or maybe at this point obviously, the word “myrrh” too takes us backwards and sideways and brings us once more where we began, in Old English, by way of “myrre,” which at one time meant “moor, swamp or bog.” Yes, we are in the bog here. A little lost. Here we are with our taste buds, our scraps of dark chocolate, the greens our loved one brought by yesterday evening. Here all at once with what is cruel, sharp, splitting, and sweet. The scores kept by the heart’s by-hook-or-by-crook bookkeeper. Diphthong, bit of language and swamp and sea. May we go on like this, rocking and mooring.