Tuesday, November 19, 2013

In any given day there exists a dandy bucketful of words, a plethora, if you will.  If one has a love of words, one likes to hear good ones, savor them, admire, maybe even envy the utterer of the rarely used word.  But too often, we are trapped in the verbal panoply of  the mundane, the plain ole well-meaning words.  Sure, they are important, necessary, linking thoughts and deeds and compliments and retractions and contractions and subtractions. They are clearly, plainly, without a doubt (but rarely indubitably) necessary in the day to day.

I have a friend who says there are some words that are just plain silly, that make you laugh just to say them.  For the life of me, I can now recall only one......noodle.  Pause for laugh. 

I thought tonight as I poured a ruby red glass of wine to prepare to chop vegetables... Montepulciano.  I said it out loud to feel it roll....it's a word that fairly slides off the tongue. It's sultry, it's smooth, it has flair, I think it dances the samba. 
I say Flamenco, like the red flounced dress of the woman
painted on the side of the building that my walking chum and I went over to see today.  The sudden chill and wind whipped around us, as we craned our necks to stare up at the old brick building where the new mural had magically appeared  since the last time we walked there. 

The words of today began to drop from my memory onto the scrap of paper by the phone.  In-cog-nito.......said with a soft but definite emphasis on the T.  Foreign, intriguing.    
Ruta-baga, a word as strange and ugly as the brown, heavy, gnarly vegetable yanked from the ground, needing the strength of three men. With its tangled, hairy roots encrusted with dirt, and it's top end distended like an elephant's trunk, it is as visually formidable as it is gastronomically challenging.  A couple of weeks ago, I left a rutabaga in a friend's breezeway when she was away, feeling like the bad joke about the woman leaving zucchinis in unlocked parked cars in shopping centers. ( Like who leaves their car unlocked anymore, really) Unbeknownst to me, she'd taken a picture of it and sent it to the Master Gardener at a local university extension office, who, as the story goes, was stumped. I'd forgotten about it.

Words like brazen, and faker, and knucklehead. The list goes on, but so many stories, so little time.....



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