Words of my Life
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I grew up in a baseball-saturated world. The radio voices of Red Barber and Connie Desmond were the water in which I and my family and my neighbors swum. It was therefore natural that I early absorbed the vocabulary of baseball and that many words carried baseball meaning to me long before I recognized their…
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We watched a Netflix series called Feel Good. I suppose that the series title must be taken ironically, because throughout the first two seasons, not one character seemed to feel even slightly positive or healthy. Just about everyone was miserable — their unhappiness usually linked to romantic or more specifically sexual dissatisfaction. The program introduced…
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When I was a boy, I was regularly reprimanded with these words (or some variation of them): "Don't slouch." "You're slouching! "You're slouching again!" "Why are you slouching?" Apparently I was a natural sloucher. It was a difficult criticism to absorb or to counter. I wasn't entirely sure what the word "slouch" meant but I…
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I've just learned a new word that and I'm trying to figure out how to work it into the conversation. Some sample usages: "Have you pandiculated today? How often?" "I'm not pleased when you pandiculate at the dinner table." "There were a bunch of kids at the museum today, and half of them were pandiculating."…
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"Kith and kin" is an excellent example of a "pairing" — sometimes called a "coordinate pair." A pairing is a linguistic event in which two words join to produce a single meaning. "Kith" has no independent existence nowadays and only exists as an element of the pair. "Kith and kin" means "family." Originally, back then,…
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The yips have been big news this week because Jose Altuve, Houston's golden-glove second baseman has made three throwing errors in two games. Glaring, costly errors. He's bounced balls to first base and to second base — throws of twenty or forty feet which he has made successfully thousands of times in his outstanding career.…
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Let me guess that a modern reader coming upon Shakespeare's euphonious phrase "vaulting variable ramps" would be baffled as to its sense. Just WS being willfully obscure, one might complain. But it's not so; it's just that the language keeps on changing, making things difficult for audiences and readers. The most obvious meaning of "vaulting…
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There are some words which one might read, study, and parse the dictionary definition and yet still not understand — words for which one has no intuitive or even rational conception. For example, there's the word "heaven." I know that "heaven" can mean "sky," a definition that poses no problem, but when "heaven" is presumed…
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“Mucilage” is a word whose sound is wildly inappropriate to its meaning. In the world of adhesive nomenclature, “paste” is good and “glue” is even better. Trisyllabic mucilage ought to denote something far more serious — perhaps a problem involving waste disposal ("OK, we've rescued the elephants, but what are we going to do with…