Called to the Bar - Some

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I don’t like the word some. It’s vague, it’s easy, it’s soft, it’s indifferent, it’s lazy, it’s foggy, it’s murky; it’s such an easy word, a word that I would have banned despite the fact that I’ve used it too many times (and I’m not in the infantile business of banning things) — somehops, some hints of this and that, some ware over the rainbow etc as in the artefact of shopping; some times, some where, some thing. And yet…some times I use the word some as carelessly as once upon a time I would have used the word hoppy or malty.

So what’s the point of declaring war on the word some? I like the idea of reducing the language in which we write about beer, like one would reduce a stock or boil a wort for a long time as I was once told about when asking how Gale’s Prize Ale was brewed (and incidentally I have just drank the last beer of mine that I got from Gale’s, the Trafalgar Ale from 2005) back in 1998, when I was starting to write about beer. I like the idea of a sparse, lean, yet fit language about beer, the kind of language that drew me to Hemingway in my early 20s (later on I loved Raymond Carver, who had his own struggles with alcohol), the kind of language that if mirrored in beer might be a saison, an austerity of beer that makes me feel good about myself, that makes me think that I have to work harder to like the beer that I pour into my glass. It’s amazing how far you can get when you think of the word some.

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