Use Five Times in a Day for Memorization

Tip for efficient morning routine: do not watch "A Baby Story" while applying make-up. Tears of happiness for people you do not know and do not care about will quickly and silently relocate your mascara to somewhere around the vicinity of your chin, thus forcing you to completely start all over as your foundation has been tracked over with sooty smears. Stick with Katie Couric, no matter how unbearable her impossibly gummy smile may be.

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I like to consider myself fairly well-versed in the English language. My father and grandfather both possessed an insane capacity to spout off words in sentences that left the opposite parties in their conversations with their mouths agape, scrambling to look up word definitions while trying not to let on that they had no idea what Dad or Grandpa were saying. I'm certainly no walking dictionary like those two were - not even a pocket-sized one - but I believe I can mostly hold my own in an intelligent conversation. Or at the very least, put up a respectable front. However, I have recently come across a blog (the writer of which is, sadly, no longer alive having just lost her life to ovarian cancer) in which most of the posts contain at least one word that I do not know, or think I know and have possibly used, but used mistakenly, or not quite in the true meaning as is intended. Her writing was captivating, and peppered with a vocabulary that I dare say almost rivals those of the two smartest men I have ever had the privilege of knowing. Almost.

I love words. I love their beauty, their strength, their poetry and their mystery. Here is a small sampling, from that blog (see here), of the words that had me grasping for Webster.

panegyric: a eulogistic oration or writing
misanthrope: one who hates mankind
hyperbole: extravagant exaggeration used as a figure of speech
misogyny: a hatred of women
nascent: coming into existence; beginning to grow or develop
epistolary: letter (as in the kind you write)
fecund: fruitful, prolific
alacrity: cheerful readiness; briskness
paroxysm: a sudden sharp attack; convulsion
aspersion: a slanderous or defamatory remark
pedantic: making a show of knowledge
paean: an exultant song of praise or thanksgiving
obfuscate: to make dark or obscure; confuse

Here's to the wicked-smaht peeps out there.