Since I am a teacher and I teach vocabulary, I thought I’d share with you a post I wrote for my edu blog a while back. It has to do with words. First, let’s start with one of my favourite extracts.

“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take “good”, for instance. If you have a word like “good”, what need is there for a word like “bad”? “Ungood” will do just as well-better, because it’s an exact opposite which the other is not.Or again, if you want a stronger version of “good”, what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like “excellent” and “splendid” and all the rest of them? “Plusgood” covers the meaning, or “doublegood” if you want something stronger stills……….You don’t grasp the beauty of the destruction of words.”        Syme talking to Winston (George Orwell in his book 1984).

This got me thinking about words and how they give colour to our life. Imagine not having any words? Imagine if we only had the words “good” and “ungood”:!! What if everything we described, had to be confined in those two words? I love words, so much that I’m actually a very wordy person, and while I think that my ‘word bank’ is kind of broke, there are a few English words I really appreciate, and that’s what this ‘ramble’ is about. So, here goes. the words I like.

Mesmerise: It makes me think of passion and love and all those nice feelings. It has a nice sound to it as well. Just love it.

Mouthwatering: Just makes me think of food and chocolate and Pavlov’s dog.

Quintessence: I don’t know why, but this word just makes me think of things that are important. Unique, significant. It gives meaning to meaning.

Mushroomed: OK, so this word makes me think of pizza, but it is also a nice word. Things popping up everywhere. Hmm, nah, maybe I like it cause I like mushrooms. Anyhoo, it’s one of my favourite words.

Cathartic: Greek word comes from catharsis. Just beautiful, as is the feeling.

Serendipity: I like the meaning. Something beneficial that happens by chance, by luck.

Word I wish existed?

Badest of course (one -d). I think the word worst does not do bad justice. I have said this in an older post. You have something bad, you add -est and it gives a whole new dimension to how bad something is.

So, yeah, that’s about it. I have no idea why I am writing this post (then again, I have no idea why I write many of the things I share on my blog), but I think about it.

Words make our lives………….. (you can add whatever you want here).

After writing this post and as I was going through my Reader, I saw that Helen has written a post about her favourite German words (she beat me to it   :D). You can read her post here.

Till next time….