Draw a hot bath and add lavender suds. Chill a bottle of Taittinger. Bake an angel food cake, compile a trifle, create an Eton mess. Arrange hydrangeas. Set out the cushion you bought in Vienna, and the other that’s large and shaped like a book. Make a playlist of Ravel and Vaughan Williams, or of John Williams, or of Lana Del Rey, or of Beyoncé. Prepare a Sazerac. Perhaps – perhaps – put out a bowl of sweet, meaty sauerkraut, if that pleases, or a bassinet of crawdads, or a little watermelon gazpacho. Create pleasures. Make luxurious. Voluptuate.
Or sink into the hot bath with lavender suds, and drink a glass or two or three of Taittinger. Eat the angel food cake, eat and mess with the trifle, trifle with the Eton mess. Admire the hydrangeas and inhale their aroma. Lean against the cushions. Let the music play. Knock back the Sazerac and reach for another. Relish the sauerkraut, peel through the crawdads, slurp the gazpacho. Take pleasure. Luxuriate. Voluptuate.
It’s a good word, voluptuate, and it means both ways: make voluptuous, or enjoy voluptuously.
But wait. Voluptuous? In the world of today, that’s mainly a word for a buxom, curvaceous woman. But that is so limited and limiting. Voluptuous means ‘luxurious, sensuous, indulgent, hedonistic, delicious’; from that it includes ‘replete with gorgeousness’. We also have the word voluptuary, which means a sybarite, one who has given over to sensuous pleasures. All of these words come from Latin voluptas ‘pleasure’, which in turn comes from volup (earlier volupte) ‘with pleasure, pleasurably’, which traces to Proto-Indo-European *welh₁-, ‘choose, want’, a word that also has among its progeny well, will, voluntarily, and many more in various languages.
Well. Do you as you will, and do it voluntarily, and enjoy it voluptuously. And, in turn, set the scene: voluptuate so that others may voluptuate.
Each of us has different tastes, of course. Many treats of the senses are best kept to moderation, lest we end up with headaches, shakes, and assorted scleroses. But there are some that can be enjoyed endlessly. Music, for one. And words for another. For those of us who savour words volubly erupting on our tongues and in our minds, language is an endless smorgasbord of verses and conversation without the vitiation of vice. And so here on Sesquiotica I voluptuate that you may voluptuate, and perhaps even vice versa.
Aina voluptuating in sauerkraut
Sesquiotica 