Once, he had mentioned this discovery to a girlfriend: lightly, almost frivolously, as if it were natural and inevitable and therefore interesting. A day or two later, in bed, she had teasingly called him ‘my fine and feathered friend’.
‘No!’ he had shouted, instantly retreating to his side of the mattress, ‘You’re not allowed to call me that!’
She had been shocked by his vehemence. And he had shocked himself. But he was protecting a phrase which had always been uniquely between Susan and himself. Except that, earlier, it had been a phrase uniquely between the newly married Mr Gordon Macleod and his hopeful, puzzled wife. So, for a while – say, twenty years or more – he had found himself morbidly sensitive to lovers’ language. This was ridiculous, of course. He saw rationally that there was only a limited vocabulary available, and it shouldn’t matter when the same words were recycled, when nightly, across the globe, billions asserted the uniqueness of their love with secondhand phrases. Except that sometimes it did. Which meant that here, as elsewhere, pre-history ruled.
— The Only Story (Julian Barnes), Loc. 2803–11