Friday, November 17, 2006

Words

I love words. I like some words merely for the sound they make, others for their meaning. I even love words in other languages. Reloj is my favorite Spanish word. Not for it’s meaning –it means watch –but for how it sounds when you say it. Rolls off the tongue quite nicely. Do you ever think about words that have no literal translation to English? How trippy is that... I like to learn new words. If I see a word and I don’t know the meaning, I have to look it up. I bought one of those vocabulary builder books, but that was kind of a boring way to learn, and I never got past bellicose, which I have never remembered to use. My old boss liked to throw big words around that he thought other people wouldn’t know. I would, of course, pretend to know exactly what he was talking about and then run to the library to look them up. That’s more fun that reading a vocabulary builder, don’t you think? He once called me valetudinarian, which made me mad when I read the definition, although it’s really not far off the mark. He also liked to call me obdurate, which isn’t really nice either. What made him think he could call me all these names?

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