It is rainy and wet here. Very rainy. Very wet. My weekly gig as Garden Apprentice was postponed until the skies brighten, which means I found myself today and yesterday with what I always claim to need: more hours in the day. Sweet!
I spent yesterday’s extra time reading and pondering words. For reasons that are not completely clear to me, I have become intensely focused on words. This sounds funny, I am sure, because I am a writer … of course I focus on words. But this is different. Suddenly my thoughts are snagging on random words, and I find myself writing them down (I am an incurable notebook scribbler) and staring at them, wondering about the words they are connected to and how I might use those connections in creative and intentional ways. This new word fetish led directly to my most recent completed work, a picture book whose structure is entirely dependent on the relationship between the nineteen words that tell the story. (More on that one day soon, I hope. Fingers crossed!)
Yesterday’s striking words, found while reading and scribbled in my notebook, were:
weft
dwine
surplusage
vespine
Say them out loud. Aren’t they lovely?
Weft is a woven fabric, and the sentence I read was this: “Such indeed is the economy of nature that secret relations and astonishing concordances exist throughout the whole vast weft of things.”
::swoon::
Dwine means to languish, waste away, or fade.
Surplusage is archaic, but means, I presume, a surplus. (Yes, I am reading old Fabre books again.)
And, finally, vespine: of, or pertaining to, wasps. This one set off an avalanche of word activity in my notebook. There are a lot of ‘ine’ adjectives that I dig: bovine, porcine, feline, canine, equine. I doodled as many as I could think of, and then spent an hour digging for more: corvine (of, or pertaining to, crows) and anguine (of, or pertaining to, snakes) and, my favorite of favorites, myrmecophagine (of, or pertaining to, anteaters!).
What will come of my word lists? Who knows. Perhaps nothing. But I realized today that the time to play and ponder words is a luxury I should give myself more often. I am, after all, a writer.
So, what words do YOU love?