I am happy to say that I have never had the pleasure of babysitting a lovesick lesbian, so this is all pure conjecture on my part. If my imaginitive faculties hold as strong as they normally do, however, I will assume that I am not terribly far off the mark in my representation of Sapphic pining.

That's one of those phrases that you never really expect to see anywhere, "Sapphic pining". I enjoy coming up with phrases like those. If I can manage a clever turn of phrase and a character that keeps an audience's interest, I feel as though I've more or less done my duty as a writer of prose. The phrase "Sapphic pining" alone should merit a moment's breather for me, some time to contemplate the linguistic oddity I've constructed just as someone else of a less healthy persuasion might meditate on the myriad flavors, textures, and aromas of a freshly-lit Cuban cigar.

I seem to have unintentionally drawn a comparison between wordsmithing and nicotine addiction...which is not wholly inappopriate. I'm honestly not sure what I'd do without words and the ability to string them together into coherent sentences. I suppose I'd play charades more. And there would probably be more fistfights due to misunderstandings. Body language just doesn't have the specificity, the fine granularity, of phoneme-based communication. Case in point: when expressing anger, one has a whole range of words from "miffed" to "royally fucking pissed off, I'm not even kidding" to describe one's state of mind. Body language follows roughly the same arc by way of "frowning" through to "kicking you in the balls over and over again until you beg for mercy or sing castrato, whichever comes first". But while words have an even progression along that line (with the several different terms for "anger" forming a tidy, unbroken continuum between the two extremes), body language suffers from the fact that somewhere along the way you must move from passive, personal disapproval to actual physical violence to make your point, and there is no smooth way to make that transition. They're discrete acts, "scowling" and "breaking somebody's nose", and there's not really any middle ground between the two. That leaves the continuum of expression for that particular emotion disjointed, making body language a poor primary method of communication.

Anyway, I guess what I'm trying to say is, "Thank Christ for the Queen's English." It keeps me from getting beaten up on a regular basis.