Exigency or exigencies….

 What will you have?

I loved today’s A.Word.A.Day

 

We could ask for many things as an urgent need or requirement: that the world be a more peaceful place, that this pandemic disappear, that there be no more disease and illness, that we know no sorrow, that we win the lottery…

 

But would these really solve our problems or would we simply create more to occupy ourselves?

 

Perhaps the best exigency that I could request, would be that I be a better version of myself, that I be more content with all that I have instead of thinking that something else would make me happier, that I enjoy to the best of my abilities all the wonderful life that I do have.

 

The attendant example of this word was a poem from Emily Dickinson:

 

“How happy is the little stone
That rambles in the road alone,
And doesn’t care about careers,
And exigencies never fears;
Whose coat of elemental brown
A passing universe put on;
And independent as the sun,
Associates or glows alone,
Fulfilling absolute decree
In casual simplicity.”
Emily Dickinson; Poems by Emily Dickinson: Second Series; Roberts Brothers; 1891.

 

OK my exigency for the day will be more poets like Emily Dickinson!

 

 

 

Kludging or

Something I’m very good at!

Languages are always evolving with new additions every year depending upon technical improvements, life-style changes and the like.

My main languages are English, French and German and it’s fun to see how they evolve differently. I admire the Germans in particular as if they need a new word to describe something they simply string a few old words together and presto – a new word that means exactly the right thing. In English and in French we tend to evolve words from more basic elements, ie slang, street talk and the like.

The above word showed up in 1962. According to A.Word.A.Day (one of my all-time favorite sites: https://wordsmith.org/awad/index.html) it has to be labeled origin unknown as although it appeared in an article by Jackson W. Granholm in Datamation magazine: “How to Design a Kludge”, various origins for his use of it have been suggested: German, Scots, military jargon, from the name of a paper feeder,” according to A.Word.A.Day.

MEANING:

noun: An inelegant, improvised solution to a problem.
verb tr.: To improvise a haphazard solution to a problem.

Latest example of my own kludging – hanging the lights on the Christmas tree.

N.B. I could also think of “klutz” for klu words but was amazed to find that it wasn’t in my hard copy of the Miriam Webster dictionary – 1966. Things change fast.

Apricity

It isn’t the first time – and it won’t be the last – that I mention my love of words and my fondness for the website http://wordsmith.org/awad/index.html.  In a recent e-mail (yes one can sign up to receive them every day!) they mentioned that of the some half a million words in the English language only about 5% are known to most of us and we don’t use even that! So this particular week is dedicated to words that exist, but that we usually have never heard of, never mind used in our daily language.

This one however, apricity (even spell check thinks that it isn’t a word), would be very welcome right now, meaning as it does the “warmth of the sun”, “basking in the sun”.

I really shouldn’t complain as we haven’t had that much snow or rain this winter, nor these few days so far of Spring, but when the Easter weekend had only one pretty day, one feels a wee bit put upon!

So I would also welcome some clarigation or a demand for restitution of a wrong. I can’t go to war with the universe never mind the weather obviously, but just knowing the words somewhat mitigates (one I do know and use) the lack of apricity as well as clarigation.

 

Sunrise one morning, but a half hour later all was again gray

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

From one of my favorite sites – http://wordsmith.org/awad/- comes this "A thought for the day":

"One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper patterns at the right moment." -Hart Crane, poet (1899-1932)

Well as one or two of my faithful followers may have noticed, words – or rather the time to find them – just hasn’t happened in recent days : mainly due to the (unusual – don’t fall over laughing now) circomstance of having visitors and being more occupied with the spoken word than the written word.

Hmmm… when this current lot – a lovely group of four young adults including two of my nephews – is gone perhaps I’ll have time to go take that bath of words and get back to blogging. 

Meanwhile, I’m living life instead of writing about it, which is not a bad thing : no energy left over when we end our evenings around midnight to record anything.

A "wordle" by Jonathan Feinberg

Inter Alia

Sounds so much erudite than “among other things” so you can expect me to make a concerted effort to maintain it in my vocabulary.

From the mundane: your grocery list may include, inter alia, bread, milk and bananas to the more common usage in formal reports such as “he was, inter alia, president of the board” we don’t hear it often.

However, it is pleasing, inter alia, to my eye, my ear and my mind.

You may never hear the end of it.

Instead of using miscellany to cover a range of unrelated subjects I can now list them perhaps using this simply adverb: examples, inter alia, various thoughts for the day that I could – and perhaps should – treat as individual topics can simply be lumped together.

• The door of a bigoted mind opens outwards so that the only result of the pressure of facts upon it is to close it more snugly. -Ogden Nash, poet (19 Aug 1902-1971)
• Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. -Blaise Pascal, philosopher and mathematician (19 Jun 1623-1662)

Oh this is, inter alia, fun.

I couldn’t resist…

My sister posted to Facebook an article about the 15 words to eliminate from your vocabulary to sound smarter (Jennie Haskamp, The Daily Muse May 4, 2015, 5:30 PM).

 

Now that was a challenge I didn’t even try and resist:

I really honestly think that maybe one should never literally nor absolutely just say amazing stuff irregardless how things went. It will always be very dumb.

Using these bold and italicized words means that this blog is definitely not eligible for the annals of “smart” and thus I shall try to eliminate them from my sentences forever (if I slip, forgive me, sometimes one needn’t always sound smart).

This in turn reminds me of another sentence:

« So difficult it is to show the various meanings and imperfections of words when we have nothing else but words to do it with ». -John Locke, philosopher (1632-1704)

Mondays…

Must

Only

Never

Do

Anything

Yesterday

Another variant would be:

Monday

Or

Needing

Discipline

After

Yesterday

Or an exercise in positive thinking:

May

Offer

Nice

Deeds

Astonish

You

See, fiddling around with words - that made this one bearable!

 

created with http://www.wordle.net

Communication: punctuation and typos

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words. -William H. Gass, writer and professor (b. 1924)

This particular offering by Wordsmith (http://wordsmith.org) got me to reflecting : how true. If we could only be more precise in our words, if we could only communicate better, how many of the world’s problems would be – if not solved – diminished.

My housemate is a writer – a published writer – but I know that when she writes an e-mail or even sometimes posts on FB that often one has to know her to realize what she meant.  The latest was « What was going to be a trying day, like most days with Rick turned out to be fun afterall.” Now, this is her husband, a husband that she loves, what she probably meant was “what was going to be a trying day, like most days (involving authorities), turned out with Rick to be fun after all”. Oh the importance of a comma or two. Sorry D-L.

I tend to write – and sometimes talk – just as weirdly as witness the following examples:

• cats = no burning blames - ok flames
• Also swept up 4 bags of leaves from my baloney (oops balcony)
• Making many trips to recycle the blottles (hmmm…. Think I drank one to many there)
• Complicated the lives we need. Oops meant obviously to write lead! But then again perhaps that was my unconscious speaking.
• Pendling brochures (and that is actually pendel from the Scandinavian languages or German meaning to commute or to swing as in pendulum) – o.k. peddling brochures
• Frieds (friends) going out to eat.

Readers of all ages, cultures and walks of life enjoy criminal novels, autobiographies, historical both fiction and non-fiction: some love poetry, others prose, yet others science fiction or any of the other modes of writing. We both learn from our reading and are influenced by our reading (especially when it comes to the half truths, non-published facts or otherwise distorted media publications).

Our world can be explained, we can get assistance in our understanding of the surrounding world through well-written articles, books and essays. I thus entirely agree that the true alchemist is now the person who can explain the world in words – who can put into words our thoughts, feelings, longings and accomplishments. Who, with words, can paint a picture of what was, what is and what will be, or can be.  

A "wordle" - you can make your own at http://www.wordle.net/create

Some of my favorite things

Notice I speak of things, not people so don’t expect any tributes to friendship, etc. although my New Year started with the luxury of being with friends and I hope that this year will be one of not only maintaining old friendships, but also of caring for all friendships, be they of acquaintances or family.

But back to “things”: again not an exclusive list, just what pops into mind (and in no particular order either): food (yep that figures high on most of my lists), travel, photography, reading, trivia, words.

I love words: reading them, hearing a good speech, a combination thereof, a play on words, and just plain old individual words.

I subscribe to http://wordsmith.org/awad/index.html as mentioned before and some days are pure happiness: today’s word “yare”.

PRONUNCIATION:

(yahr or yayr)

MEANING:

adjective: 1. Easily maneuverable; nimble. 2. Ready; prepared.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Old English gearo/gearu (ready). Earliest documented use: 888.

So I can imagine myself nimble all whilst being prepared (good thing I noticed this after I had fulfilled some of the items on my current “to do every day” list).

Now what’s even more fun is that this combines two of my favorite things: words and trivia. Note the date at which it was first documented: 888. With a bit of luck it was on the 28^th of August – or the last entirely even-numbered day until the 2^nd of February 2000!

Just makes my day to combine these two things – and the sun is even deigning to grace us with its presence so although the 2^nd day of the year was looking to be pretty bleak (everything still shut, nothing planned with either family or friends, gray skies) – it has done a 180° switch and turned into a great one.

May we always be yare for opportunities and positive changes.

I’ve got a bleb, or…

Fun words

Sometimes the sound of a word is enough to make me happy, sometimes it is the silliness of saying the word or the thought that it engenders.

I subscribe to “A.Word.a.Day” http://www.wordsmith.org/awad/ and enjoy almost every single one, but todays was simply too much fun: “bleb”

Now try saying that out loud, several times in a row, shout it out, whisper it.

It tickles my funny bone.

Thought to have perhaps come from “blob” (tickles me also), when one looks in the dictionary http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bleb it is only a small blister or particle, it’s sound however is ever so much more.

Imagine throwing into some dinner party conversation: oh, did you see the bleb on my foot… or

I have a bleb somewhere that really bothers me, or do you ever get blebs?

Come on, I dare you, bleb, bleb, bleb.

Or you could, in the medical world, have blebbing (the noun) or perhaps in the philosophical world your thoughts (like mine at this point) are all blebby (adj.).

Have fun – look for more of those: blab, bleb, blib, blob, blub. Roll them off your tongue, look up blib (yep its an actual word)in the Urban dictionary: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=blib (especially #5 – who knew?). Have a great day in the world of words.

Adventures in other languages

Ah the usefulness of languages: being able to more or less navigate in three, I have long realized the benefits of other languages. Sometimes it is the English that best explains a situation, sometimes the French is more elaborate, a verbal bouquet of “fleurs” (flowers), then again it might be a pithy German expression such as Schadenfreude that makes it into our own vocabulary

Now Facebook is not necessarily known for its wealth of properly written sentences (sorry, even I am not always ready with a grammatically correct phrase whilst replying to one or the other posting), however it does introduce one to some lovely sites where one can enjoy the written word, be it quotations, be it slang, be it funny, be it profound.

This morning I came across one such site – thanks Shawnee - delightfully labeled “Word Porn”  ( mailto:https://www.facebook.com/thispageisaboutwords ) where the word of the day  “Nothing haunts us like the things we don’t say” Mitch Albom, led me to the site where I discovered Dormiveglia., which was described as “the space that stretches  between  waking and sleeping”. Well it is actually an Italian word that means half-awake, or half-asleep, whichever you choose, but the description is a great one of how many people look at their day!

So, off to explore more fun words, such as alexithymia – go on, I dare you, look it up! Words are such fun!

Just make them all golden.

The power of one

Or a totally different story

This one has absolutely nothing to be with contributing only goodness to society, but rather is about words and how enormous the change is when one swaps one letter for another.

I amused myself whilst driving home the other day – and couldn’t find anything for X until I looked in a dictionary: the others are as they came.

ace   / age

ban  / bun

can / con

den / din

eat / ear

far / fir

get / got or goat / gout

hat /hot

ice / ire

jab / job

kiln / kilt

lamb /limb

mate / mute

never / newer

ode /ore

Pack / pick

quack / quick

rest /rust

son / sun

trap / trip

udder / under

vane / vine

wham / whim

xeno /xero (both are not words, but rather prefixes, but that’s all even the dictionary could come up with).

yen / yon

zap / zip

They say “what a difference a day makes”, I say “what a difference a letter can make”.