I do a lot of random reading at any given time.  Internet articles (good sources only!), children’s books, banned books, science fiction, fantasy, non-fiction.  You name a particular genre, I’ve probably read something from it.  Lately, my reading has turned to essays.  I’ve read essays by A.A. Milne, Zora Neal Hurston, E.B. White, D.H. Lawrence, and Ernest Hemingway among many others.

My goal in reading so many essays is to figure out what exactly an essay is.  I’m no nearer to that goal than when I started.  Indeed, I think I’m even further from that goal now.  However, as I read I come across words that require more investigation and/or explanation.  So, I keep a note card and pencil handy to write down the words I would like to look up.  At this moment I have 21 words on my list.

My favorite word to say is snickersnee.  It’s fun.  It sounds like something to laugh about.  And it was, until I looked up the definition on Dictionary.com: A knife, especially one used as a weapon.

There is really no humor there.

Another word I found without a reference in my vocabulary was buncombe.  So I dutifully looked it up.  I actually do have buncombe in my vocabulary!  Just not spelled that way.  I’m used to seeing it as “bunkum” and it means nonsense.  I don’t see it as nonsense when spelled buncombe.  There should be something to buncombe instead of nonsense! It looks important.  But by definition it is not.

Boobery made me snicker, I will admit.  It has the word “boob” in it, and I have a pre-adolescent mind sometimes.  I’m not entirely sure how I feel about a slang word for breasts (typically a feminine attribute) being in a word that means stupidity, but I will go with the etymology that places boob’s emergence (another snicker)somewhere between 1590 and 1600, and was meant as a stupid fool. The usage as a term for breasts came later.

The last word on my list that interests me is calaboose.  It’s just a slang word for jail.  It’s fun to say, though, so I’m going to work it into every day conversation more often.

“Oh, did you hear about Frank? Yah, he is in the calaboose for stealing donuts from Casey’s!”

And now I have to go off and read more and in the process find more fun words.  I may even post some of the more fun/interesting ones here.