Sex and death are the primary human nouns, according to the cheerful and terrifying anthropomorphic oven mitt on the paper placemat lining my plastic tray at the Brother Theodore Memorial Arby's downtown. The wording on that might be a little off, I was reading it upside down and it was partly obscured by a Chicken Fingers Combo. What the oven mitt doesn't tell you is what words come next. What a provocative mitt. Another couple of nouns, a few key verbs, an adjective or two, it doesn't take much of a vocabulary to be completely versed in the terminology of the human condition. Koko the gorilla could probably sum it all up for us while clutching a banana in her disgusting foot. There's probably a Rilke among the upper primates, I mean not including Rilke himself. If your face is expressive enough you can even get rid of a couple of words. Animated eyebrows alone can lighten your load considerably. Sorrow, for instance, where would sorrow be without the contortion of faces. If I suffered from locked-in syndrome I would be hard-pressed to express my feelings of despair merely by blinking, a coded sequence of blinks would not really capture my feelings. Some people blanch or go ashen but don't really change expression much despite volatile emotion. They just look somehow vaguely stricken and are bent on staring fixedly at air. A lot of people don't show happiness well but seem expert at displays of rage and disappointment in a thousand different shadings. My stepfather was that type, and when he'd occasionally show great positive feeling it was all the more grotesque and upsetting, like seeing a morose slumping doll suddenly jump off the shelf and start jitterbugging. A seizure of joy, we'd absolutely run screaming. I've never blanched, to the best of my knowledge, so I've learned to say holy shit instead. My skin is not particularly dark, but still I do not blanch. People with darker skin don't blanch, blanching is more of a pink-skinned phenomenon. Australians are often very pink, what is it about Australians and their pink, rosy, or ruddy complexions. Cate Blanchett blanches well. Then again if your skin is very pale you might find it hard to blanch since skin can only get so white before it goes totally transparent and your insides show. Holy shit is so commonplace but it can cover a lot of expressive territory. Still it would be better if I had a face to make instead in case I lose the power of speech. I don't blanch and I tend not to cry much, but I do livid well and I have a very good stunned-anew-by-human-stupidity face. Overall though I rely on words probably more than I should. The really scary thing about locked-in syndrome is that everybody already feels locked-in anyway, who needs a neurological calamity? "Just think if I couldn't communicate!" Jeez, look in a mirror why don't you. Hello!