A family member sent me a new word this week: POOTLE. It's a verb which means to move slowly and with no purpose. Ironically, well probably not, the person who sent it to me has made pootling into an art form. It describes her to a T. One of the things which happened as a result of her offering is it started me thinking how many words float by us of which we don't know the meaning. Now, granted, there were more of them at age 10 than at age 70, but they still turn up especially when reading. Fortunately, I may have lost my innate ability to SPELL (so annoying - thank heaven for spellcheck), but I haven't forgotten the meanings of most words I come across. So, I was thrilled to be presented with a new word, and one which is so useful. I tend to hurtle through life flinging words behind me as I dash.
It made me start thinking about what are my favorite words. Ah, yes, you can have favorite words just like favorite colors (purple and red), favorite seasons (spring), favorite teams (OU anything, Texas Rangers, and Dallas Cowboys). I think English lends itself to the pastime of collecting words you like because it has incorporated so many words from other languages. There are 171,000 words in English (plus 47,000 archaic words). It's very hard to 'count' the number of words in ANY language. Example: Do you count the different tenses in a verb as separate words? The closest you can come to counting the number of words in a language is to count the number of entries in a standard dictionary. Using that criteria, Korean has over 1 million words and Japanese has 500,000. The other Romance/Germanic languages come in at about half the number in English. English is so prevalent in the world today, many languages simply incorporate an English word into their own language especially technical words.
So, what are some of my favorite words? Hmmmm. Here's a non-definitive list of words that just floated to the top of my mind:
Ubiquitous - existing or being everywhere, especially at the same time
Codswallop - nonsense or rubbish (especially works well as a synonym for bullshit)
Onomatopoeia - words that sound like sounds (Examples: buzz, ding, splat, boom - there are hundreds of these. A great family game is to try and construct a list of these words.)
Dohickey or Thingamagig - words to use when you can't think of the exact name of something (very helpful 'senior' word) These two refer only to inanimate objects, and actually may be regionalisms.
Persiflage - good natured bantering. My favorite kind of speech.
Copacetic - in good order - used with 'everything' as in "Everything is copacetic." (Aside: Excellent name for a boat.)
Peripatetic - traveling from place to place (pretty explanatory, right?)
I'm fond of any word that can be used in the place of common profanities. My first attempt at Lenten sacrifice was to give up profanity for 40 days, and let me tell you if you think giving up every word that's running through your head right now including DAMN and HELL which are so ubiquitous as to be almost non-profane, well you just try it this Lent. I seldom remove words from my vocabulary, but I've striven to keep these out especially now since we keep a two year old parrot five days a week (AKA 30 pounds of joy, AKA 'the Huckleberry, AKA 'Cedric').
Language and words are a major importance at our house since we've been teaching The Huckleberry how to talk. There's actually a system which works great at the very beginning of the process. However, once you're past the beginning, well, it gets really complicated. Life is a constant stream of 'how to' conversations - usually starting as monologues - then refined when you realize you've used at least four words which need to be defined. Word play games are very big right now. I discovered the other day he not only recognizes all the letters of the alphabet, but he knows the sounds of the letters. One of his games is to substitute the first letter of the words of a song or his name. (Example: Who's here today? "Dedric".) And, don't get me started on the pronouns ME and YOU. We are still in a muddle over those two.
I truly can't remember a time when I didn't love words. The day I discovered there was an entire book of words was utterly thrilling. In middle school I used to secretly read the dictionary amazed at how many new words I could find. Learning the SAT vocabulary was not a chore. Another secret pleasure is archaic words. [Archaic words are ones which have fallen out of usage.] Here's a great one: animalcule - meaning microscopic animals.
So, tell me, do you have favorite words? Did your mother or father have a favorite word which you can still hear them saying? This inquiring mind wants to know. Leave a comment; I'd love to hear from you.
