Word

I bought one of those Word-A-Day calendars to improve my vocabulary for college.

reify – to regard or treat (an abstraction) as if it had concrete or material existence.

Words are like prodigies. They may want to stay inside where it is safe and warm but they'll never live if they never play outside...and find themselves lost in the cold.

Without another word spoken on either side, the lodger took from his great trunk, a kind of temple, shining as of polished silver, and placed it carefully on the table.

Rotor is a fine palindrome, thought Frank Leigh Dearie as he ambled down the Lost Highway.

'Right again, quite right,' said Mr Swiveller, 'caution is the word, and caution is the act.'

The >>Word of the Day<< today over at dictionary.com is >>oblation<<.

>>Oblation<< comes from the past participle form of the Latin verb* >>offerre<< meaning >>to bring<<.

So, an oblation is an offering or a gift.

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* A Latin verb is traditionally cited by giving four forms, in this case: offero, offerre, obtuli, oblatum.

The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.

(Mark Twain)

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Words like winter snowflakes.

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 – Homer (c. 700 B.C.)
 – The Iliad, bk. III, l. 222

Spaces define which letters to together to make up a word.

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There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.


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 – Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
 – The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain [1952], st. I

A word after a word after a word is power.

(Margaret Atwood)

“Be careful what you say—you may have to eat your words.”

I don’t think so much about eating my words as about wearing them. When someone sees me, the words come back to haunt like a miasma around me. No matter how colourful my dress, bad words turn everything grey and muddy brown.

LI

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

--The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
(trans. Edward Fitzgerald, 1st ed.)

Words beginning with the »sn« sound in English are often unpleasant: snide, snob, snigger, sneer, snicker, snub, snert, snotty, snippy, snit, snarl, snore, sneak, snag. »Snow« is a word over which there is debate and even an annual change of heart. The first snowfall is almost always welcomed. Christmas snow is considered magical. But too much of a good thing for too long and March blizzards push »snow« into line with the rest of the »sn« words.