Porosity. The word sat there in the middle of the sentence like a boulder in my stream of thought. How do I even pronounce that? Pour-Oh-city? POR-oh-city? Every iteration feels as awkward as the first. But I’ve got an iPhone, I’ll just look it up. And Wikipedia hands me another ladle of confusion. To paraphrase, the word salad “definition” (I use that term loosely) someone sweated over, building leaf by leafy green opaque leaf read something like it’s the ratio of void space over void space to the power of void space, in the void. They sure liked the word void. It was the kind of definition that I feel certain is technically correct, but explains absolutely nothing.
What the heck does this thing mean? I go back to where I saw it, one of Ross Gay’s essayettes. Maybe I can do the thing I learned in school decades ago, glean some hint of meaning from the context? The word seems to be about how he picked up some gestures from a friend. I turn it over in my mind - pour-OH-city. I am hung up on the ‘o’ sound in the word - for some reason, precoffee, I am just not connecting the dots. So, I do as I’m wont to do and turn to AI for an answer - and the moment the word porous lands on the page everything clicks into place.
Porous. Pour-US. The word is Por-AH-City. Porosity like Curiosity. It’s about things like sponges, and sandstone, and things that water, and life, and joy, and other people’s gestures can leak through and blend together. It’s a beautiful word that I did not know until this moment, and then I am left wondering - why did the way my brain translated the sound matter so much? What was it about the pronunciation which gated my understanding? The moment I had the right sounds, all the meaning and comprehension blossomed in my mind in an instant. Porosity; how permeable something is, how much space there is, room for water, or other particles, or ideas, or habits from others can penetrate or be absorbed.
It is a word that hints at how open we are to be influenced by others. Porosity I now suspect is what makes us “sticky.” We bond, we bind, we intermingle and in a myriad of tiny ways we become the people we hang out with. All of that unlocked… once I knew what it sounded like because, I suspect, that sound unlocked the association with porous in my head. Pour me. Pour us.