Cosmic string
Until she was converted to feminism, my mother used to write 'string' on her shopping lists when she meant 'tampons' or 'sanitary towels'. I have long been fascinated by this - the unspeakable being unwriteable; the panoptic sense of surveillance which means that you are accountable for what you write in so private and impermanent a medium as a shopping list (although perhaps she was wise to feel visible ); the imagined dialogue with yourself in the shop 'ah yes, it says string here, I must have run out of tampons' or do you stop noticing that it's a substitution and just read 'string' and think 'tampons'?; the potential for overstocking with actual string if someone else ended up doing the shopping. Consequently the word 'string' has a double meaning for me.
Last night I was listening to a podcast of Material World as a sleep-aid (recommended, although not as highly as From Our Own Correspondent and Today in Parliament). It was all about Cosmic String and featured various men repeatedly using this phrase and talking about string which stretched all the way across the universe and tied it together. My brain was full of some very odd images as I fell asleep.