For as long as I can remember I have always had a fascination with words. Tis true.
Some words I like to hear ? I enjoy their sound, the way the vibrations tingle my little ear bones. Some words I like to say; I like the feel of them as they stumble out and off my tongue. And some words I love to see written on a page before me so I can imagine their cadence. Their silent rhythm playing in my imagination.
This ‘thing? with words may have to do with my earlier-in-life attempts to speak English. I had a tendency to stutter and stammer and to jam all syllables, consonants and vowels into single torrents of gibberish that made the most hearty of teachers cringe whenever I raised my hand to answer or ask a question.
I could see it in their eyes when they had to pick me. They couldn’t say it out loud, but their eyes cried out for me to just S-L-O-W down and let the words breathe.
Mom gave her 1920s typewriter from the 1950s to me when I was in the third grade (in the 1970s) so I could peck out little tales of inconsequence, one letter at a time.
Crack, crack, crack, is the sound I remember hearing when the type would smack against the ribbon, leaving an ink letter on paper.
I loved, love words.
I can remember sometime before reaching double-digits in age and being at a friend’s house and using some words over and over (and over and over) ad nauseam to the point the friend’s mom banned me from using that word.
The word? Well, it’s not a cool word like ‘frabbajabba.? It doesn’t sound interesting now and probably sounded less so then . . . cheap. That’s it, the word was ‘cheap.? When something didn’t go as planned (which was always the case with me), I would chime in with my shrill boy voice, ‘Rats, that’s cheap!?
To get around said word censure, I changed gears on the fly and substituted ‘cheap? with ‘that’s inexpensive!? Soon, that phrase was also thrown on the literary trash heap by mean old adults, too. Not to be thwarted and much to the consternation of aforementioned mom, I switched to a new language, Spanglish. ‘That’s el-cheap-o,? I would protest.
Sometime around 10 or 11 years of age, I started to collect my words (mostly made up) and write them down in Dandy Don’s Dictionary. By 12 or 13, I threw away my magical new word writing pen and put in a mighty effort not to be a dork and conformed to the lingo my classmates used.
By the way, no copy of that wordly collection of mine remains and the only two words I remember included are el-cheap-o and el-fart-o. (I never said I was clever.)
In the eighth grade I won a writing contest for a local newspaper and (praise be to the Spirit of Hemingway) was awarded a new paperback Roget’s International Thesaurus.
Let me tell you, there was nothing better than leafing through those pages and seeing all the new words therein. I was in heaven, and as I think about it, therefore could still have been considered to be on the dorkside of life.
In the tenth grade I placed in another local writing contest and was awarded a big, fat, blue hardcover dictionary. I still have both the thesaurus and the dictionary.
And, to this day the dictionary sits on the living room coffee table. When my two sons were younger we would play The Word Game . . . ‘open the dictionary to any random page, pick out a new word, spell it, pronounce it and tell me what it do mean? was my mantra.
(Yikes. I may have inadvertently pushed my sons into dorkdom. Add another thing they can tell their therapists about me in the years to come.)
Over the years, new words have come into being, mostly based on new technology. I am pretty sure ‘googling? is now a word found in on-line dictionaries across the blogasphere. And some words I have no idea where they come from, like twerk. Where did that come from? Probably the same type of brain that produced el-fart-o!
That said, here (in no particular order) are some words I like that are not used nearly enough in modern communications.
Cacophony, Mitigation, and Caterwaul
Skulduggery, Ossify and Dank
Canoodle, Concupiscence and Chagrin
Refute (not to be confused with Rebut)
Stifling
Swell (like, ‘Gee Wally, that’s just swell.?)
Consternation, Whilst and finally Reckon
What do they mean? Look ’em up!