Nancy Nicolescu

For over four decades, Nancy loved teaching her K - 12 students to discover their voices. As a Doctor of Education, Nancy mentored beginning teachers to do the same for themselves and their students. Following a deep loss, Nancy fell silent; only recently did her own voice resurface in her writing. Nancy’s voice also can be heard in her photographs.

choice words 

Among the many courses I’d selected from the Rutgers academic menu for my doctoral studies in the late ‘80s, one — Readings In Rhetoric — was most transformative for me as a language arts educator and as a sometime-in-the-future maybe more than just a sometime writer.

The professor and, later, dear friend Ron Christ — introduced me to rhetorical devices far beyond the singular standby “simile” that most middle and high school English teachers sold to their students as sufficient, and who swiftly red-penned students’ run-on sentences, denying any potential for their rhetorical effect. In Ron’s class, I met Plato and Quintilian and Cicero, and became thoroughly smitten with their theories on becoming educated, on developing eloquence, and on enchanting audiences through discourse. I discovered hundreds of figures of speech — anaphora and epistrophe; synecdoche and metonymy — and understood how each could serve to arrest an audience’s attention by their artful spoken or written arrangement. I parsed passages; counted clauses; reconstructed long-winded James in the staccato rhythm of Hemingway. I tried my hand at low, middle, and high styles of writing: casual “chestnuts” were elevated to more glamorous “marron glacé.” In a nutshell, I learned to choose my words carefully; to select the words that would most precisely convey my intended meaning and persuade — moreso, move — a reader or listener.

Classical rhetoricians regarded a rich vocabulary as a requisite to refining rhetorical flourish. My maternal grandfather, once an eighth-grade English teacher in Newark — gifted me a hardcover dictionary — a foot thick, from a to z — for my high school graduation in 1971. He inscribed the inside cover:

Dear Nancy,

Inside you’ll find all you need to succeed in college and in life —

except how to find and keep a man!

Love,

Grandpa Lou

Oftentimes, in pursuit of the perfect utterance, I’ll wade among grandfather’s words of wisdom, leapfrog from one pair of guide words to the next, linger upon one possibility and land on another until the optimal option occurs to me. Other times, I attempt to grasp the right word with a set piece of hand gestures: my fingers first furl closed, then fling open like a magician’s now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t handiwork, and like copping a coin from behind a kid’s ear or unloosing a length of scarf from a senior’s sleeve, I tease out a fastidious turn of phrase.

I deplore emojis; detest internet slang. I’m turned off by texting; turned on by letter-writing. Even in my long-hand, lengthy correspondence, I cherry-pick words that best capture events and experiences and emotions I wish the recipients to relive with me.

Careful not to tear the spine of the aged yet timeless warehouse of words, I lift the weighty Webster and lay it atop my thighs. Give me the word, the whole word, and nothing but the word — the choice word.