The Vibes I Bring to the Function

Tuff versus Tough and Anchor Tattoos

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

One of the fun things about teaching is that sometimes you get to teach a class you know nothing about, without more than three days advance warning, and not many materials to help you figure it out.

Welcome to my spring semester.

The trade-off for feeling completely unprepared for my new Young Adult Literature class is that it’s online. I can build it as I go. And, I get the excuse to buy (and read) some new books. No complaints from me.

Up first: The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton, which I read so long ago I really couldn’t remember most of the plot points. I’ve got to say, I think it still holds up. As a coming-of-age novel, as maybe one of the first books to be classified as YA (don’t quote me on that), as a book my college students have regularly mentioned as being a favorite, I can now join the Ponyboy Sodapop Greaser party.

The whole reading experience has me thinking about connotation, a term that usually gets taught at the 100-level as “the associations a word invokes,” in addition to its literal dictionary definition (denotation). The word “battered,” in “My Papa’s Waltz,” for example, is a word heavy with connotation. Most students, at least when asked to really look at that poem, don’t miss it.

But a word is more than just its meanings and associations. I’ve always thought of connotation as how a word lives inside us, a big, beautiful, breathing thing. Or a tender, seedling kind of thing. It holds memory and magic and the secrets of our spiky inner worlds. It’s the baggage we bring with us to the page—in the best possible way.

In The Outsiders, it’s Ponyboy distinguishing between “tough” and “tuff”:

“Tough and tuff are two different words. Tough is the same as rough; tuff means cool, sharp–like a tough-looking Mustang or a tuff record. In our neighborhood, both are compliments.”

The true achievement of a book like The Outsiders, for me, is not just the tenderness of the coming-of-age story or the voice of young Ponyboy, but how we get so close to him that we learn the way language functions for him and his friends. We see words like tough and tuff grow from tangled roots, changing as the characters change. Because that’s what people–and words–do.

Words as memory. Language as discovery.

Cue me pausing in the middle of a wildly enthusiastic lecture about THE JOY OF TRANSITIONAL PHRASES to say, “You should see me try to make small talk. I’m a real party-starter. Not awkward at all.”

Also, cue a much younger version of me taking in a large, audible inhale when I walk into a library. Little Penny is not so different from Older Penny.

As a child, I learned language the way most of us do. We hear it or see it and then we figure out what it means. Cataloging the misspoken words of my son when he was a toddler (and sometimes even now) is one of the true joys of parenthood. But my own misheard and misunderstood words especially stick out to me:

1. The first time I heard the word “Bachelor,” which was also the name of my family’s bar (but spelled wrong: “Batchelor”). I thought it sounded like the word “pistachio.” I couldn’t unlink the two words now if I tried.

2. The way I thought “yearn” meant the same thing as “urine.”

3. How fancy and elegant the word “mozzarella” sounded in my ear. Like “Cinderella” but saucier.

4. When a boy in my 8th grade science class told me that the word “libido” (which we knew because of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” thank you very much) was another word for a part of the male anatomy.

If these are the vibes I’m bringing to the function, I’m okay with all of it.

My own connotation with any of the above words is now rooted in place and time, an origin story of sorts. Can you see it? A word as a river. Or better yet, a word as the boat in the river. No, the word as an anchor. The word as an anchor tattoo on the bicep of a sailor, faded but not fading. Permanent. Aging and stretching with our skin.

As a writer, it all matters. One word chosen instead of another. George Saunders calls it: “making thousands of what I’ve come to think of as ‘micro-decisions.’ These are instantaneous, intuitive – I just prefer this to that… I just have a feeling and react to that feeling, in the form of a cut phrase, or an added word, or an urge to move this whole section, and so on.”

Not just for writers, though. For humans. Toni Morrison, as always, says it best: “Word-work is sublime…because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference – the way in which we are like no other life. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

And it hurts to be human. This fact has never been more palpable. I find myself getting more than a little pang of emotion just thinking about My So-Called Life, a TV show I adored in the 90s, so how can I expect to get through a whole day without the serious pain of being human?

I mean, I don’t. I can’t. I don’t think any of us can.

IYKYK

We do language. This year, this January in particular when I’m deciding where to spend my rage and fear and static energy, how to conserve that energy for what matters, what to feed to the online oligarchy who own all of it versus what good I can do offline, language is what I keep coming back to.

Language is tough. And tuff. Both are a compliment.

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I’ll be in touch soon, my friends, with more exciting updates about Doll Parts.

Happy new year again and anchor tattoos forever,

—Penny

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Doll Parts, forthcoming from Sourcebooks on August 26, 2025, is a dual timeline suspense following one woman as she begins to uncover the truth of the death of her estranged best friend and the Sylvia Plath adoring sad girls they attended college with decades ago, all while holding a secret that will slowly unravel her new, suburban dream life.