Words, Words, Words...

by Jeanne Adams

Writers live for words. We play with them. Substitute them. Delete them, add them and even invent them. Our "job" if you will, is to wordsmith; to hammer at the verbs and nouns, pronouns and participles, forging them into sentences that invoke images in our readers minds. If we do it well, we eventually get to the point where we win contests, get contracts, and get to see our name in print. Woohoo! If we don't...well, we don't. But print or no print, there are very few of us who could actually stop writing, even if we decided this publishing nonsense was for the birds. I know several Banditas who will admit that they tried to stop - much like giving up drugs or smoking - but came back to the addiction after a month, or two. In some cases, it took years to return to the "habit" but return they did. They couldn't stop. (Thank goodness, where would we be without Anna's CTC? and AC's wonderful soon-to-be published works?)

Neither can I, of course. Stop, that is. Thank goodness too, since if I'd given up, I'd never have gotten to be a Bandita, never gotten the privilege of a publishing contract. Not only that, my dear, departed Mama would have risen from the grave and boxed my ears. (She was a never-say-die kind of lady!) Grins. With an English teacher for a Mom and a Director of Libraries (now retired) for a Dad, I learned to love and play with words at an early age. My whole family loves books, love words and puns and malapropisms. Shakespeare, Dickens, Dante, Thurber, Dickinson and Austin were Olympians in my house. Point in fact, we can all quote from Macbeth and Othello. (And Mad Magazine, and the movie The Princess Bride!)

But its the playing with the words, the sly puns and the double entendres that's the most fun. Don't you agree? My sister regularly sends me "Eggcorns" - the misuses of words and phrases by public figures, all listed in their glory on the Eggcorn database. An Eggcorn, BTW, is what someone called an acorn. Some of my favorites include:

A posable thumbs - the real phrase? Opposable thumbs, meaning our ability to grasp.
A mute/mood point - the real phrase? A moot point. (Just how would one make a mute - silent - point? Assassination?)
A shot over the bough - the real phrase? A shot over the bow, as in the bow or front of a ship, rather than the limb of a tree.
And other words - the real phrase? In other words.
Collaborating evidents for the real phrase Corroborating evidence.
Extract vengeance for exact revenge...
Lack toast and intolerant...heehee, the real phrase? Lactose (milk) intolerance. This one nearly made me inhale Diet Coke when I read it, I was laughing so hard. I'm STILL laughing at it.


Never seizes to amaze...for never ceases to amaze
Reek hammock (It stinks, I tell ya!)...for wreak havoc
Take with a grain assault (Quit throwing rice, darn it!) for take with a grain of salt
Two sense worth...two cents worth

You get the idea. And then there are the authors who in their zeal for the language, use a word in their book that is so arcane, so obscure that it stops you in your tracks and you have to go look it up. I read Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory's trilogy as it came out over the last two years. In the first book, they used the word marmoreal. I had no idea, from context, what on earth this could mean. I had to look it up.

What I mean is that it bothered me so much that I had to stop reading and Go Look It Up. Grrrr. Thankfully, I have this awesome, massive, four-inch-wide, ten pound dictionary. It exists solely to offer definitions for those incredibly odd, old, or long-forgotten words; unlike the ubiquitous Collegiate Webster's everyone has from school. As an aside, I met a woman not long ago who doesn't own a dictionary. Sacrilege, I say! Egads! How can this BE? (She owns five Bibles, but not one dictionary. What's wrong with this picture? I've had to look up tons of Biblical babble! Haven't you?)

BTW, marmoreal means "like marble." Yeah. Uh-huh. I use THAT one every day, don't you? Or remuda, which is a herd of horses. Yup. That's self-evident. NOT! Even those of us crazy enough to have taken Latin (JoMama, I know YOU did!) can't get some of these because they aren't based on Latin. Then again, lamia is Latin, but who the heck would get vampire out of the root word for blood? Jeeez.

Language, in all it's forms is so fascinating. The learning of it, the playing with it never ceases to fascinate. I love learning new words and phrases. I like to hear slang from different countries-our Banditas from Oz tell me that "flat out like a lizard drinking" is a euphemism Down Under for going fast. Did I get that right, gals?

What are some of YOUR favorite words, phrases or slang? Ever have to look one up, like marmoreal? Teach me a few new ones, ladies! The most unusual wins a Bandit Booty Barnes and Nobles gift certificate.