Wednesday 13 July 2011

Wordy

Truculent isn't a word I use regularly, neither is xenophobic. There is of course a very good reason for this namely I only have a vocabulary of five hundred words (exactly) and these two bad boys are coming in at five hundred and one and five hundred and two respectively. This simple fact has placed these two very useful and certainly meaningful words outside of my current range of basic word benchmarking if you will. A lesser man would perhaps be frustrated by this limitation but not me, when faced with using words outside of my vocabulary and over that somewhat abstract, imagined yet tangible line of five hundred I simply use the time honoured technique of substitution.

For example if I wished to use a word such as “azle” (coming in a seven hundred and ten) I might just use biscuit or roller, or if wanted to say “pernicious” (a close one at fivefivefive) I could say hammock or liquid. Easy. This method has saved me conversational(?) embarrassment many times over and the fact is that as conversations and debates run on few people if any notice it when you drop and hammy, stupid or inappropriate word in there. Language should flow freely, abstractly at times, make interesting noise and allow itself to be as absurd as the topic. Folks the truth is, people only really ever listen properly to what they are saying themselves, everything else is blah-blah right up to word five hundred. Don't believe me? Next time pay close attention to where their eyes are focused as they speak...

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