I was a weird kid, living high in my head, with odd habits and interests. I already wrote about my bloodshot-eyed, jonesing-junkie sugar addiction here on the good Dr. Wilson’s blog, so I won’t go deeply into that. But strange things gave me pleasure, like sitting in those artificial environments created in furniture stores, where there might be a coffee table, couch and chairs with room dividers, with bookshelves holding books and limply “elegant” tchotchkes on the end tables, a strange simulacrum of a living room or den.
Whatever chink in my character, I enjoyed sitting in those airless regions and pretending this was my life, looking over my books and my staid furniture, while actual adult customers (and the salespeople) would eye me with mild alarm. Another thing that interested me back then was nice glassware, to the extent that I bought a HUGE brandy snifter, one that my 16-ounce RC Colas would barely make a dent in. At 10, I’d walk around my parents’ house, swirling my sweet beverage, hoping that someone would notice just how sophisticated I was.
That’s a long lead-up to what I actually wanted to discuss, which is loving words. In this case, I’m not talking about meanings; I’m referring to loving the feel of a word, its texture, whether it’s silky or scratchy, the odd combo of visual/visceral sensation you might get in your head from processing the very spelling of a word. That kind of word sensitivity started young in me too—maybe it was all those ice-cream brain freezes.
The Weight of Words
Anyway, I had an early awareness of the weight of words, and some I gravitated to some more so than others. For instance, words with “x” in them, like bollix or flummoxed. Do those give you the little frisson I’m alluding to? And how certain words feel just right in their denotation: queasy has that little lurch or drop in its letter construction—in its stomach—that is carried through in its definition. Or a word like morbid: it has a deliciously dark feel.
I’ve heard it said by some comedians that some words, by their letters alone, are funny. Words that start with “k” or the k sound, for instance. Probably why I like the sound of the word crapulous—or maybe it just harkens to my Coke-crapulous days behind a gargantuan brandy snifter.
Digging Through Your Dictionaries
I wrote an essay a while back for a magazine called Verbatim, about the crazy collection of dictionaries I had, and how fun it is to just flip through them and look for words that have a furry feeling, or a sinister sparkle, or a wry rictus. It’s a challenge to look through any dictionary page and not see some words that make you squint or grimace or grin.
Like your words ‘lectronic? There are bunches of word sites, but here are a couple of fun ones: wordnik and wordoid. Wordnik has a nice interactive aspect where you can upload your own usage notes, comments and citations to their word examples. Wordoid lets you play with made-up words. But don’t let your mother catch you.
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