Moo!

 

Three brief reflections, based on word encounters in the past few days.

Moo!

Yesterday Sue and I were at Spokane’s Vanessa Behan crisis nursery, where we have long volunteered by playing with kids or holding crying infants. A cheerful 2-year-old sat on my lap as we read one of those books with pictures of animals. This girl, whose language skills and vocabulary are on the cusp of exploding, latched on to the noise a cow makes. So she and I just kept saying “Moo!” to each other. Her vocabulary will soon burgeon, but for now she has a thorough grasp on the noise a cow makes. Me too.

Kench

On Sunday a friend sent me a list of about twenty “words to revive,” terms that have faded from English usage. Here are three verbs that I’ll add to my collection:

·         Brabble—to argue loudly

·         Jargogle—to confuse things or mix them up, and

·         Kench—to laugh loudly…

I looked up these definitions and confirmed the first two. But Merriam-Webster knew nothing of “kench” and laughter; instead, it defines the word as a noun, “A bin or enclosure in which fish or skins are salted.” Actually, that was my first guess.

Dialing

Over the weekend I read about the way we use outdated concepts to talk about new technologies. It referred to words like dial or a phrase like hang up, concepts from the days of rotary phones that we keep using even though we’re neither dialing anything on our smart phones, nor hanging them up. Or we speak about tuning in to a radio program, when there’s no dial in sight. Likewise, when did you last see a carbon copy of anything? Yet we send emails with blind carbon copies (bcc). Or rewind a digital program….

Time to sign off.

[300 words]