Pertaining to Long Words

My name is Tishabug, and I'm a wordaholic. 

I love words nearly as much as I love books. 

I love how words look, how they feel in my mouth, the power they hold to reveal or conceal, how, short or long, a single word can become a whole story in itself.   

  Over the years, I've picked up new and interesting words from signs, by listening, through reading (rather a lot), from daily word emails, and as co-captain of the Terre Haute North Vigo High School state championship SpellBowl team. (Why, yes, it is quite appropriate to bow.)  

I've even been known to make up a word or two in my time.

 I don't often, if ever, use most of the interesting words I've collected. As much as they delight me, I have also learned the  value of speaking plainly and clearly -- to eschew obfuscation of my oral intent via sesquipedalian declamations.  

A fancy words just isn't very useful if the person you're talking to isn't crystal clear on it's meaning and connotation.

So I continue to collect words in silence.  Some are big, some are simple, some delight me in their appropriateness, their puniness, or that just look, when written out, very much like or opposite from their meaning.  Sometime, I even look at word I've known for decades,  and find that truly looking at it on the written page, it seems all of a sudden alien.

One of my favorite words came my way from the book Crazy English, by  Richard Lederer:   

Hippopotomonstrosesquipedalian

This is certainly one of the most delightful words I've ever met.

First, it's impossible not to smile at the utter silliness of its pieces and parts. I can just see hippopotamuses (or is it hippopotami?) and monsters, quipping and skipping joyfully around a sundial. 

Second, speak it.  Say it out loud.  Feel it roll around your mouth like a month-old puppy let out on the fresh grass after a long afternoon in his crate.  It makes the mouth unabashedly happy.

Now, consider the appropriateness of its definition. It's an adjective meaning "pertaining to extremely long words." How perfect is a word that defines its very self!

Finally, consider all of these as you look at the word on the typed screen.  Notice how it starts all big and wide and round, and roly-poly, just as it sounds, proudly showing off its excessive width.  Then as it nears the end, it squishes tighter together, trying to make room for every last letter, holding its breath to fit those last letters in before it runs out of space.

Yes indeed, it's a Hippopotomonstrosesquipedalian delight.

 Just thinking on this word is, in spite of myself, bringing a little up-curved grin to the side of my mouth.

But, for all that, I'm glad I never faced this word in SpellBowl competition. The sudden appearance of 150 imaginary quipping monsters and hippopotami (or is it -muses?) would surely have instigated an official challenge from our team nemesis, those unimaginative arch-rivals from Bloomington South.

Reading Like a Velociraptor

I've always been a voracious reader.  

I love that adjective here. Voracious. Try moving your mouth around it's delightfully vicious syllables.  Now think of a Jurassic Park-style velociraptor attacking a book with his long, sharp, hungry teeth… ripping it to shreds, devouring it, grinning with the anticipation of a sated appetite as every bite goes down his craw.

That's how I read. I devour books with eager, hungry abandon:  getting what I want or need out of the book, not worrying if the odd bit or corner or sentence falls along the wayside. I eat each book up, feeding my hunger for stories, for knowledge, for understanding, for escape.

And yet, I've always struggled with literature classes, and continue to struggle with literary criticism or analysis.  I rarely come up with the "right" answers in class, and, more importantly, find that I just don't really care. 

 The best part of books, to me, is that they leave openings for the imagination to fill in the blanks and create the pictures.  A book is like a conversation: shaped as much by the nature of the listener/reader as by the words of the talker/writer.  The writing and storytelling of the author are certainly important, but their meaning for me, the reader, is shaped as I read by my own life experiences, sometimes even by the time and place I read any given sentence.  

Perhaps it's time to finally get around to finding a book club, to give me the extra excuse to find more time to read. 

Except for that part where I don't actually like to  discuss or critique books with a bunch of strangers, because it is a little too much like baring my soul...  

Maybe I can just bare my voracious velociraptor fangs instead. 

Or , you know, distract them with wine and cookies.

Some Good Reads...

Recent favorites :  The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern;  A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

Currently reading : Little, Big by John Crowley

What good books have you read lately?