SIROCCO VERNACULAR

In writing this, I notice it costs me not to use certain words more than I ought to. I am thinking about the word "just." I almost wish I could have written that the sun just shone and the tree just glistened and the water just poured out of it and the girl just laughed--when it's used that way it does indicate a stress on the word that follows it, and also a particular pitch of the voice. People talk that way when they want to call attention to a thing existing in excess to itself, so to speak, a sort of purity or lavishness, at any rate something ordinary in kind but exceptional in degree. There is something real signified by that word "just" that proper language won't acknowledge. I regret that I must deprive myself of it. It takes half the point out of telling the story.

-from Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson