Thankful Thursday: Unfurl no more
On this Thankful Thursday, I am thankful for fresh words, and weary of the worn-out ones.
I spend a great deal of time pondering word choices:
- At Seashore Family Literacy, the Word Wall is home to our favorite words.
- With clients, colleagues and friends, I mull pressing issues, such as: What's another word for quell? or Is there a one syllable word for overwhelmed?
- At home, I often roll out words in random but rhythmic succession, producing an eye-rolling husband who says, We're doing this again?
As much as I love words, I loathe a few, too. The other day I got a two-line email from my mother that reminded me of the love/hate state (of words, not mothers):
Words I am sick of, she wrote, crisis, emergency, disaster, bipartisan.
She's right. From politics to pop culture, we get stuck in word ruts: game-changer, end of the day, sustainable, green, transparent.
Words innocuous in small amounts grow unbearable with repetition: amazing, dude, awesome.
And a flip turn-of-phrase — Seriously, really? — grates in the constant replay.
In fiction and poetry, once lovely phrases have, with repetition, set me on edge: whorl, unfurl, lavender.
And while I can sling the snark, I take my own arrows, too: I must stop replying to surprising news with Wow! And I must stop peppering poems with gloomy and gray, and ending with again and again. Perhaps this public airing will remind (read: shame) me into finding fresh words (and stop complaining about the weather).
The world is full of words, let's use more of them!
How about you? What words are you sick of seeing? And what words do you over-use?
Thursday, March 24, 2011 at 11:57AM
Reader Comments (2)
Thank you for bringing this up, Drew. While reading, I thought about how I'm rarely as concerned with my overused, trite or inconsequential words as I am with the ones I can't find. I've spent whole afternoons tramping back and forth over the tip of my tongue looking for one word that I just know is sitting there. Sometimes I'll wake in the middle of the night with it, only to forget it again by morning. It's those words that befuddle me and cause me to disgrace myself once again with the overused and trite words and phrases. I think I'll start a Word Garden where I can plant seeds for new words and ideas to spring up. Yes. Maybe I'll do that.
A Word Garden, what a lovely idea, and placed beside the Word Pool, where we can dip in and lounge about in a Word World.
Thanks Auburn!