Quirky Thursday: Word Health

Speaking of health, how is your vocabulary health? I love words!  They don’t even have to be real words.

Am I the only one who gets a kick out of those “verification words” that you have to copy when posting a comment on someone’s blog or buying tickets over the internet? Words like sonsh, gulapi, havsjul, or moxbo. I confess, a couple of times I even copied the word wrong on purpose to see what word I would get next. I think it is just that I really like words and the sounds of words. How do you get that job of inventing those verification words? I want to apply for it.

Speaking of words, I love to read good writers because they have such amazing ways of stringing words together. Like this quote written by a well known British author, P.G. Wodehouse, “He was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say when”!  Reading books by authors like John Steinbeck and Charles Dickens are word indulgences.  The thoughts they can convey using words sometimes just floor me.

I recently realized that there are some words that I feel pretty confident that I have never used in any of my writings, and I am looking forward to fitting them in somewhere. Great words like foment, denigrate, and avuncular.  I think it is a fun thought to know that you can do something new and fresh just by using a word for the first time yourself, especially in writing.

Remember Reader’s Digest section called, “Increase Your Word Power”? I miss that.

Then there is the Bible, which is God’s Word to us humans.  Words from the Creator to the creatures.  That is pretty awesome and humbling.

Words: written, spoken, sign-languaged; real or non-sensical; in a multitude of languages; encouraging, destructive, or neutral; funny, serious, instructive, accusatory, loving, or meaningless; poetry, prose, or conversation.

I cannot imagine the world without them.