Verbosity

Created by Zia, adopted by Helen and Charlotte, this little meme is both irresisitible and a brain buster. How, exactly, am I supposed to choose one favourite word out of all the thousands I have access to?

A word that describes me is:

D says I’m Eclectic.

Is that another way of saying Confused?

My favourite word is:

Onomatopoeia.

My least favourite word is:

Nice.

So bland.

So lazy.

So blah.

Should be immediately banished from the English language.

Use these two words in a sentence:

It is nice to say onomatopoeia, to hear the syllables and feel the rhythm as it tumbles out of my mouth.

A word I have to think twice about pronouncing is:

Ennui.

You’d think that by now I’d have this one clear in my head. I still pronounce it as I see it, with three syllables and not a trace of the French origin.

Dictionaries. Printed or online?

My mother, when talking about my love of reading, often used to say: “She’ll read anything, even a dictionary.” When not in the mood for fiction or an encyclopaedia, I would pull my grandfather’s dictionary from the shelf and start poring through its pages. I have the Second Edition of the (one volume) New Oxford Dictionary of English beside me as I type; two pocket dictionaries in the bookcase; and my dream is too add all twenty volumes of the OED to my shelves.

And yet, when I’m searching for something on the fly, I’ll turn to dictionary.com to check meanings or spelling. Did you know, that if you use FireFox you can type “dict word” into the address bar, hit enter and you’ll be taken to the definition for that word. Very handy.

A word whose meaning I cannot seem to retain no matter how many times I look it up is …

Anodyne.

Aah, this is where printed dictionaries come into their own. Most of the online resources I use define this word in terms of pain relief (as a noun) and as something which is relaxing (as an adjective). The OED defines its use as an adjective somewhat more expansively: “not likely to cause offence or disagreement and somewhat dull”.

Open a dictionary to a random page and find a word you don’t know. Post the word and its meaning.

Quean: noun archaic an impudent or badly behaved girl or woman. A prostitute. (OED)

Use the word and the word you can never remember in a sentence.

That anodyne little fellow, Smith of Smithfields provoked an outcry of disgust when he arrived at the centenary celebrations of his family’s namesake park, accompanied by an infamous quean.

(Apologies to Charlotte for further maligning Smith of Smithfields.)

One of the most overused words in my area of work/study is …

One use of this word to describe a far-reaching round of redundancies was enough to qualify it as overused:

Realignment.

You realign the books on your bookshelf.

You have your tyres realigned when they are not balanced.

You don’t make jobs redundant and call it a realignment of the business.

If you’ve read this far, you’re tagged.