"I’ve spent my life immersed in language, but this relationship, like all relationships, is fraught."As a writer, I’ve spent my life immersed in language, but this relationship, like all relationships, is fraught; for each word I love (conditional, complicity, complication—do we start to see a pattern?) there are also words, or word types, that I loathe. These include euphemisms, nicknames, and what I think of as disagreements. Working backwards, let’s take epiphany as an example, not because I don’t admire the lilting rhythms of those four syllables, but because I don’t believe epiphanies exist. Sure, we may have certain “Aha!” moments. But what do they add up to if they do not alter, in some fundamental fashion, the way we live? We’re born, we die, and no one ever changes really. Even for James Joyce, an epiphany is just a literary device.