Unusual Words

“If a word in the dictionary were misspelled, how would we know?” - Stephen Wright

Books are wonderful diversions that allow your mind to stray from day to day worries. I discovered the books do not have to be a riveting fiction or non-fiction read when I ran across The Word Lovers Dictionary: Unusual, Obscure and Preposterous Words by Josefa Heifetz. I like words so I found the title intriguing.

The dictionary is wonderful and has provided me with hours of enjoyment. The book is filled with…well…unusual, obscure and preposterous words which (according to the claim on the back cover) are all accepted as formal or legitimate English words.

The longest word in the book has 1,913 letters and no, I am not going to attempt to type it. It’s a chemical name for an enzyme with 267 amino acids. Another word with a mere 1,185 letters is the protein part of the tobacco mosaic virus (whatever that is). I’m quite sure these words won’t be needed for anything I write, but what a bummer to draw either at a spelling bee!

I hoped learning a few new words would stimulate my mind and get the creative juices flowing, so I flipped through the dictionary, selected some random new words and went to work.

The yiver (greedy, eager) woman performed lecanomancy (fortunetelling by looking at water in a basin) for her neanic (youthful, immature) client who said his anomia (inability to remember names) had cost him his job.

Hmmm…I’m almost certain I’ll never develop the sentence into a novel or short story, but I have certainly entertained myself and, hopefully, learned a new word or two in the process.

If you ever have the urge to entertain yourself by writing nonsense sentences with unusual, obscure or preposterous words, try Mrs. Byrne’s Word of the Day at http://textstore.co.il/mrsbyrne.html for a daily tidbit from The Word Lovers Dictionary. And then, by all means, share your creation with us.

As you may have guessed, there’s no news from ArcheBooks on the publication process of The Ride.

Thanks for stopping by. See you next week.

Jane Kennedy Sutton
Author of The Ride (to be released by ArcheBooks Publishing)
janekennedysutton@gmail.com
http://janekennedysutton.googlepages.com/
http://www.authorsden.com/janesutton



Tags: The Ride, ArcheBooks, Word Lovers Dictionary, Heifetz, Mrs. Byrne, Stephen Wright, unusual words, longest words