I do a lot of random reading at any given time.\u00a0 Internet articles (good sources only!), children’s books, banned books, science fiction, fantasy, non-fiction.\u00a0 You name a particular genre, I’ve probably read something from it.\u00a0 Lately, my reading has turned to essays.\u00a0 I’ve read essays by A.A. Milne, Zora Neal Hurston, E.B. White, D.H. Lawrence, and Ernest Hemingway among many others.<\/p>\n
My goal in reading so many essays is to figure out what exactly an essay is.\u00a0 I’m no nearer to that goal than when I started.\u00a0 Indeed, I think I’m even further from that goal now.\u00a0 However, as I read I come across words that require more investigation and\/or explanation.\u00a0 So, I keep a note card and pencil handy to write down the words I would like to look up.\u00a0 At this moment I have 21 words on my list.<\/p>\n
My favorite word to say is snickersnee.\u00a0 It’s fun.\u00a0 It sounds like something to laugh about.\u00a0 And it was, until I looked up the definition on Dictionary.com: A knife, especially one used as a weapon.<\/p>\n
There is really no humor there.<\/p>\n
Another word I found without a reference in my vocabulary was buncombe.\u00a0 So I dutifully looked it up.\u00a0 I actually do have buncombe in my vocabulary!\u00a0 Just not spelled that way.\u00a0 I’m used to seeing it as “bunkum” and it means nonsense.\u00a0 I don’t see it as nonsense when spelled buncombe.\u00a0 There should be something to buncombe instead of nonsense! It looks <\/em>important.\u00a0 But by definition it is not.<\/p>\n Boobery made me snicker, I will admit.\u00a0 It has the word “boob” in it, and I have a pre-adolescent mind sometimes.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n The last word on my list that interests me is calaboose.\u00a0 It’s just a slang word for jail.\u00a0 It’s fun to say, though, so I’m going to work it into every day conversation more often.<\/p>\n “Oh, did you hear about Frank? Yah, he is in the calaboose for stealing donuts from Casey’s!”<\/p>\n And now I have to go off and read more and in the process find more fun words.\u00a0 I may even post some of the more fun\/interesting ones here.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I do a lot of random reading at any given time.\u00a0 Internet articles (good sources only!), children’s books, banned books, science fiction, fantasy, non-fiction.\u00a0 You name a particular genre, I’ve probably read something from it.\u00a0 Lately, my reading has turned to essays.\u00a0 I’ve read essays by A.A. Milne, Zora Neal Hurston, E.B. White, D.H. Lawrence, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizabethzaske.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizabethzaske.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizabethzaske.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizabethzaske.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizabethzaske.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/elizabethzaske.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16,"href":"https:\/\/elizabethzaske.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10\/revisions\/16"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizabethzaske.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizabethzaske.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizabethzaske.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}