The Language of Giggles

So in my own clumsical way, something about my last post reminded me of one of my greatest loves in life.

Words.

Yes, A Mom on Spin is unabashedly in love with the English language.  Yeah, sure, English may not be officially listed as one of the snobby Romance Languages, but it tops the list of Giggle ones.  There are countless words in the dictionary that make me smile.  Words like . . .

betwixt

and

akimbo. . .

Oh, and I absolutely adore the word askance. (Truth be told, I've recently discovered that I love any word with an "a" placed in front of it. .  .words like. . . akin. . . aggrieved. . .and aforementioned. Add an "a" to any word and "A" Mom on Spin will be adamantly "b"smirched with it!)


Curmudgeon.  I ask you, is there another language that would have such an appropriate-sounding noun for such a bad-tempered person?   Add to it the fact that you can put the adjective cantankerous in front, and even a cantankerous curmudgeon would be begrudgingly beguiled about the sound it made.

Cahoots!  I, personally, would be debilitatingly delirious if I were decisively in cahoots with someone. (And while we're hovering over the letter "d" for the moment, I also feel the need to tell you that I feel what might be an unnatural attraction to the word debunk.)


If  you're a regular reader of this blog you must know by now that I have been both enthralled and enamored with the words feckin' and fiddler's fart ever since I watched Angela's Ashes for a second time.  Enough said.

Kindred. Only kindred souls would be in cahoots with each other.


And how about some of those big time words like loquacious?  Obfuscate?  Ubiquitous?


Ginormous.  There.  I have used the word ginormous in a sentence.

Did you know that Mr. Webster only officially approved of the word ginormous in 2007?   (Before its entry in the dictionary we were forced to use the equally-giggly humongous in its place.) And this beauty of a word was only able to take up residence in the dictionary after it won Webster's on-line poll of Favorite Words (Not in the Dictionary).

And then, like my own clumsical word that set this whole post aflight, there are the whimsically-mish-mashed  words that I absotutely adore in what can only be described as a Suessish kind of way. Words that vocabularians - like moi -  have simply made up because they make us smile. These words, like ginormous, may still be officially classified as neologisms, but they still top the list of my Favorite Words (Not in the Dictionary).   Words like. . . .  

Fa-cocked. . . Fer-clooked . . . Fash-muncked. . .

and let's not forget

. . . beautious . . . confuzzeled. .  .schlumped. . . piffulous. .  .schmiglet. . . flusterpated. . .slickery. . .and . . . schlopp. . .

So romance-schmance. . . .here's to the Language of Giggles!




Do you have a neologism to share?  Have at it. . . .

My Daughter the Philanthropist. . .

So I signed on to my facebook page after a bit of an extended absence only to discover that Trigger and Ponzi have been writing on each others' walls.  Wait, let me be more specific. .  .fighting on each others' walls.   That's right, leave it up to my two daughters to air their little sisterly tiffs in the most public way possible. . .

And, in the process, I discovered quite by accident that Trigger was coming home for Thanksgiving on Friday and so I threw caution to the wind and commented on Trigger's wall  by saying:

Home Friday?
As in THIS Friday????

 I also discovered that Trigger had written on my wall - and this specific scribble had something to do with her sorority's charity fund-raising efforts. It read:

Mom you didn't donate to my philanthropy.

Now I owe $30!

DONATE NOW!

to which I replied:

Since when did you become a philanthropist?

YOU are MY philanthropy

and I don't see anyone donating to me, now do I?????

Why doesn't facebook have a button that says "dysfunctional"????

Oh and yes, I still miss the days when Writing on Someone's Wall involved crayons and a spanking, but we just may get back there yet. . . 

Hanging with the Plantagenets

So if you have been lamenting my absence lately, you can blame it all on Drip Dry - for he's the one who insisted on buying me a NOOK for my birthday despite my declaration that I would never enjoy reading a book on One of those things!  But once I finished Ken Follett's new 985 page Fall of Giants in glorious hardcover, I was out of  "real" books, so I turned my attention to the pseudo-impostor book-nook.

And I haven't come up for air since. . .

That's right. . .  No blogging. No facebook.  No twitter. No emails (well, except for the 36 or so that begin, Your Barnes & Noble order has been successfully downloaded) because, you see, they didn't have all of these social media connections back in medieval England, and that's where I've been living.

In the High Middle Ages.

That was, until I entered the Renaissance.

Oh, I have read about every king, prince, bastard, and pretender to grace the Court of England since William the Conqueror.  I can trace the lineage of every duke, duchess and earl in both the House of Lancaster and the House of York.   I can name Henry the VIII's six wives backwards and forwards.  I now know exactly what the Groom of the Stool was "privy" to.   And I am waiting with bated breath for Philippa Gregory's newest book, One Queen, Two Queen, Red Queen, Blue Queen.

I would love to enlighten you all further, but I think my NOOK is now fully recharged. . .

Face it. . . I'm "D"ficient.

So I've had a touch of Blogger's Block recently and I think I know why.

Along with some funky auto-antibodies, my rheumatologist recently discovered that I was significantly deficient in Vitamin D.  And once I read up on the myriad of ailments that can come from a Vitamin D deficiency, I became convinced that the "D" of Vitamins is truly like a wonder drug.

So now I'm thinking that lack of this essential vitamin just may be responsible for all of the joint and muscle aches that drove me to the doctor in the first place.  It could also be the cause of my fatigue and high blood pressure.  It may, in fact, be contributing to my elevated blood sugar and "bad" cholesterol - and it could be the very reason I have been self-diagnosed with G. S. D. (Goldilocks Sleep Disorder.)  I'm thinking it's also the reason that I drink too much wine and have recently been experiencing a strange craving for nachos.   It could even explain why I ate all the Halloween candy, my cat threw up, and my husband left his dirty dishes in the kitchen sink this morning.  I think it's also the reason I'm mean to my daughters and don't know my right from my left, and - as long as we're on the subject - I'm practically convinced that only those with sufficient levels of Vitamin D win the Mega Millions.

And so, after a $78 trip to the health food store, I am now on my way to a newer, better, less-painful-and -blogger's-blocked me!

I hope. . .