I love words! I enjoy listening to people talk, just so I can hear how they pronounce words. I like hearing colloquial-isms and jargon and spoonerisms and reading the thesaurus. When I'm reading stories to my children, I like to concentrate on precisely pronouncing each word. I have fun playing with my diction, and playing with words. We play rhyming games and onomatopoeia and alliterations. I read the book "Runny Babbit"

(by Shel Silverstein, his last book before he died) to my kids. HA! That was so much fun. I totally recommend it to you. Good luck reading it out loud...that's a huge tongue twister, but such a funny one; I triple-dog dare you!

So anyhoo (see, there's one of them), I am always on the look-out for a fun, new word. The English language is chock full of words I've never heard of before, that no one uses anymore. Every once in a while, I run into such a word. I have MSN's Encarta saved to my Favorite Links, so I can look up a word just as soon as I find it (can't wait! must know now!). I started a collection of words I didn't recognizing - starting with hirsute - covered in hair; having a large amount of hair (from Latin hirsutus “shaggy”) - about two and a half years ago. I felt like my brain was turning into mommy-mush, and I had to do something to stave off the impending mental atrophe. My list (a document I fondly call "Amber's Vocabulary Words"...I'm such a word nerd) is now 80 words long. Do I have a favorite? It's hard to pick just one...I'm fond of them all, just because they're fun and intelligent and different. But I really like maledicta – punctuation and other marks substituted for specific obscenities, so readers can tell what they are without having to read them and piffle - nonsense: silly talk or ideas. I just found a new one tonight, prompting this post: germane – relevant: suitably related to something, especially something being discussed. Mark said he already knew that one. I am already looking for ways I can use it in ordinary conversation: "Honey, that's not exactly germane. We're discussing Christmas presents for the kids, and you go off about dental check ups". Can't you just see it? Here are the last few words I found. I like them a lot (of course I do, or they wouldn't be on my list). They're fun to roll around on your tongue (and yes, they're all part of our language):

• kvell - feel delighted and proud
• schadenfreude – gloating at somebody else's bad luck: malicious or smug pleasure taken in somebody else's misfortune
• profligate – wasteful: extremely extravagant or wasteful
• insalubrious – unwholesome: not pleasant, healthy, or wholesome
• consigliere – adviser to organized-crime boss: an adviser to the leader of a crime syndicate
  

  

I know. Not everyone gets all giddy about vocabulary. Normal people are insouciant (unconcerned, cheerfully unconcerned or unworried about something) when it comes to terminology. Some of you probably moan and roll your eyes at the mere mention of vocabulary. No doubt, you have bitter memories from High School English. You may find yourselves singing that song from "My Fair Lady" (Words! Words! I'm so sick of words!). You may ululate (howl: to howl or wail, in grief or in jubilation) when faced with someone like myself, fascinated and obsessed with language arts. My heart goes out to you. I get a lot of joy out of words. Maybe it can be contagious?