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Good morning. I was phubbed this week – you probably were too. It happens all the time these days. Phubbing is a newly minted word to capture that special moment in a conversation when the person you’re talking with loses interest – you notice them looking away from you and into their phone. Phone-snubbed - phubbed. I can’t complain. I’m a culprit as well as victim. Most of us are. There’s another new word making a bid for the dictionary. This one is designed to convey that sense you’re left with when you’ve been really looking forward to something - say in the final hours of a football transfer window, or with the return of a favourite TV series - but the reality is… well… all a bit of a let-down. The word coined for this is anticipointment – that dismal marriage of expectation and let-down. Some new words work and catch on, others grate... and soon disappear. Where English isn’t up to the task, another language often is. A book published this week, Speaking In Tongues, explores the nuances of speech and strangely apt expressions from around the world. For instance an excellent Armenian saying, perfect for that moment when someone is proving particularly annoying. The expression they use is this: ‘Stop Ironing My Head’. That could catch on. While in Tibet there’s a phrase which could be useful on the Today programme, with a particularly evasive politician. They talk of ‘giving a green answer to a blue question’. Sounds familiar. Words and speech are part of our evolutionary story, our creative response to the daily puzzle of being here… how life can be beautiful but also baffling. And if it’s difficult to convey in language what we know with our five senses, how much more so the depth of our spiritual experience. The Catholic philosopher Herbert McCabe caught this lyrically when he said that God ‘is always dressed verbally in second-hand clothes… that don't fit very well.’ But, still, words are usually where we turn first. The Prophet Muhammad is said to have come up with 99 Names for the divine. Judaism has a tradition of 72 Names. Zoroastrians listed 101. Recognising the limits of the lexicon Jesus resorted to storytelling and metaphors – I am the gate, he said, I am the bread, I am the light. But there were also times when he said very little. When the words didn’t fit. When he disappeared for days in search of solitude. We are meaning-seeking creatures but words, new or old, don’t always capture it. Some days music is what gets it, or art. Some days silence. As the Sufi mystic Rumi put it, completing a poem where’s he’s tried to put it all into words, ‘A great silence comes over me, and I wonder why I ever thought to use language.’