I like words. I like how they make me feel. I like how they roll off my tongue. Words like filipendulous are phonetically fun to enunciate, as is intractable, which has an empowering definition as well. Then there are words like smellfungus, which make you giggle like a 12-year old boy. This interesting information came from NewsMiner out of Alaska in their article, “How word lovers made ways to find new words.”
Call me a logophile. I am okay with that. It puts me in the same group as Webster and Roget, or at least close.
Webster was a logophile’s logophile. He completed the first draft of his thesaurus in 1805 at 26 but didn’t publish it until he retired 43 years later and worked on it nonstop for four years. Then he continued tinkering with it until his death at 90.
Roget started with an idea and then kept searching until he found the word that best expressed it. He believed there just might be a better word to use if he kept looking.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
