Words

 

It is seldom when reading English, I find a word I don't know. When I read French that can happen every few pages. Today, I was stopped in an English book by the word...

Spatulate

I asked my husband. I was relieved he didn't know it either. 

When I typed the word spatulate, the fact that spell check underlined the word as wrong, made me feel even better.

According to Merriman-Webster it means shaped like a spatula a spatulate leaf  or  spatulate spines of a caterpillar. There are spatulate tools.

I do know what spatula means so I didn't have to look that up. So much for the rule when defining a word, don't use a form of the same word in the definition.

Words have always fascinate me. I used to be jealous that my mother always knew all the words in the Reader's Digest vocabulary quiz. Decades later, when I come across a copy of the magazine, so do I. 

In our family we would play with words and thus I learned to love the exact meaning and the nuances. Thus, it didn't bother me at all when gay took on a meaning so different from describing a happy mood to a sexual preference. Evolution of meaning is how languages evolve. If they didn't we would probably still be speaking Olde English or the Middle English or say Chaucer's English in the Canterbury Tales.

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,

And bathed every veyne in swich licóur

Of which vertú engendred is the flour;

As a writer, when I'm editing my manuscript, I often substitute one word for another that conjures up a stronger meaning. For example, in writing this blog conjure up replaced creates.

Words have history. Spaulate was found to be first used around 1760.

I still have my favorite words that I use when I can throw them into a piece of writing or a conversation. They are plethora, gobsmacked and peckish.

I love color words. Purple has many and to name just a few violet, aubergine, lilac, mauve, periwinkle, plum, orchid, etc. It might be fun to get a sample of each, then have people assign what they think the color is for each sample. I can imagine fist fights starting over it and someone would end up with purple, plum, violet bruises.

And I love as a writer or a reader, I can find a word like spatulate and have fun digging out the meaning.