There’s a word (probably there are several, but this is the one I’m aware of at the moment) with which I’ve had a lifelong relationship. A dysfunctional relationship. (But pretty much all my relationships are like that.)
The word is “gunmetal.” And to understand what it means to me, I have to take you back (kicking and screaming, probably) to my childhood (which was an extremely tedious one during the periods when it wasn’t extremely horrific).
I spent a lot of time in my head. I was thinking like a writer, I think, even though I wasn’t actually doing much writing. But I was thinking about words, as well as the things that mattered to me.
One thing that happened in my emotional world was that I fell in love with a certain kind of weather. It’s a summer day, and the sun has been shining brightly. And then a storm blows up on the horizon. So there’s bright sunlight where I am, but a dark, dark backdrop of clouds is looming in the distance. And all of nature – the grass, the golden fields, the trees, are shining with the full brightness of summer in contrast to that dark wall of approaching storm. Like an army of dark trolls advancing on a city of treasure.
Such days filled me with longing and aspiration. They were a promise that life could be bigger, richer, more transcendent. Ordinary life might be tedious and gray and repetitious, but beauty did exist. There it was, right before my eyes, no charge for admission. Even I could dream of higher things.
And when I thought about how I’d write a description of such a day, I hit on the word “Gunmetal.”
Yeah, that was it! Gray like a gun barrel, in contrast to the gold and green of the earth.
Then I looked up the word in a dictionary.
“Gunmetal” does not mean steel gray.
Gunmetal is a type of bronze – an alloy of copper, tin and zinc. It’s gold in color. Sometimes it’s also called “red brass.” They call it gunmetal because naval cannons used to be made of it.
Nothing gray about it at all, except, I suppose, for the smoke.
Well, that made me feel ignorant.
But imagine my amusement when, more than once over my years of reading, I’ve come across a page where some novelist describes a sky as “gunmetal gray.”
So I suppose I could get away with it too, if I wanted to.
But by now it’s kind of a cliché.
If you’re gonna have a cliché, it seems to me it ought to be accurate, at least.
