I'd like a word

I don't remember a time when I wasn't in love with words. This is not surprising, given that I came from a family of great readers and great talkers. No one ever had to tell us "use your words." Words were our currency.

The Reader's Digest, which I completely gobbled up as a kid (along with its poor, but blessed, relation The Catholic Digest), had a number of features that I enjoyed. "Humor in Uniform," tickled my fancy for some reason, even though my father's stories about his time in the Navy in WWII were funnier. (The only peril he experienced during his four years was while on a ship in U-Boat infested waters while being transported to Trinidad, where he spent part of his war before being transferred to Navy Pier in downtown Chicago. So he didn't experience any combat horror shows.) And I dreamed of experiencing (or observing) some little humorous incident that I could send in to "Life in These United States" and get to see my name in print. Plus earn $50, or whatever the going rate was.

But my favorite feature was "It Pays to Increase Your Word Power."

I don't remember what words I picked up from this little exercise, but each month I avidly looked through the new list of words they provided.

In high school, in addition to our grammar and literature texts, we used a book called Word Wealth. 

More fun with words!

My family played word games, too. We had the board game Keyword, rather than the "classier" word game, Scrabble. Which may be why I never became a scrabbler. Boggle was made for our family. And we fought for the honor to solve the Word Jumble published on the comic book page of the Worcester Telegram.

There was a TV game show at one point - I can't remember the name of it, but I think the host's name was Bill (but not Bill Cullen). The object of a game was to trick someone into believing the wrong definition of an obscure word. We played a homemade version of this, plucking words we didn't know out of the dictionary and making up a definition of it. One word I came across while grazing the dictionary was "prepuce", a word for foreskin that I have not since encountered. God knows what my 11-year-old understanding of this word once, but I believe I saw the word "penis" in the definition, so knew enough to avoid it. 

Ah, the dictionary. 

One Christmas, my "big" present was my very own copy of the Webster Collegiate Dictionary. Which meant that I no longer had to use the family's communal dictionary (a blue-covered version from the 1940's that had been my mother's; an avid crossword puzzler, she wasn't going to be without a dictionary). I remember sitting there, dictionary in lap, browsing through it. (It was in my mother's blue Webster that I encountered the word "prepuce.")

Senior year in high school, we had to write an essay that was the etymology of a word. Mine was "mouse." I don't know whether the words were assigned or we got to choose our own, but I'm guessing assigned. I just can't imagine I would have picked "mouse." The essay required a trip to the Worcester Public Library to access their Gutenberg-Bible sized Oxford English Dictionary. Great fun!

I remember that, at one point in Merry Olde England, "mouse" was synonym for prostitute.

Fast forward a few years, and I had my very own abridged version of the OED, a two-box set - a gift from my mother - complete with magnifying glass. I hadn't looked at it in years, so I gave it away a few years ago. 

Today, of course, dictionaries are online. This mostly works, but you never get the satisfaction of just flipping through the pages and letting your eye land on a new word.

Still, I do find myself occasionally hunting and pecking around Merriam-Webster.com, and I follow them on Twitter. (Whoever does their social media is quite good.)

Each year, Merriam-Webster looks at the stats on online lookups on their dictionary and comes up with the Word of the Year. 

Somewhat inevitably, the word of the year for 2020 is pandemic. I saw somewhat inevitably, because that word could just as easily been coronavirus or COVID. But pandemic it is. (Coronavirus placed #2.)

What else was on the list?

• Defund: thanks to the Black Lives Matter protests over police violence.
• Mamba: from Kobe Bryant's nickname, Black Mamba, for which interest spiked around the time of his death.
• Kraken: as in the popular meme "release the Kraken", which gained prominence when one of Trump's nincompoop - now there's a word! - lawyers threatened to release evidence of election fraud. Like the sea monster, Sidney Powell's Kraken turned out to be mythical.
• Quarantine: although I have to say that anyone who's been quarantined - as my family was when I was a kid, once for chicken pox (my sister Kath had a particularly virulent version) and again when I had scarlet fever - wouldn't need to look this one up.
• Antebellum: after the group Lady Antebellum changed its name to Lady A, an acknowledgement that for Black folks, the pre-Civil War period doesn't exactly evoke memories of hoop skirts and mint juleps.
• Schadenfreude: which I suspect will also be on next year's list as various members of the Trump family and/or Administration are indicted. This year, this word enjoyed had a few spikes. When it was announced that Trump had coronavirus, lookups grew by 24,800% in comparison to the same period lookups during 2019. 
• Asymptomatic: a word that now trips off our tongues, as we wonder whether that unmasked man who just passed by is a carrier. 
• Irregardless: regardless of whether you can look it up, this is a word (or non-word) that should never be used.
• Icon: as in John Lewis and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. (May they rest in power...)
• Malarkey: an old favorite. Thank you, Joe Biden, for bringing back one of my father's frequently used vocabulary words.

Oh, it didn't exactly increase my word power, but all in all, a pretty good list. Wonder what lookups 2021 will bring...