A Week of Words

 

A Week of Words

Well, 10 days to be precise. I’ve just returned from helping to look after our twin three-and-a-half year-old granddaughters in Pennsylvania. Always alert to new, unexpected or otherwise interesting words or expressions, I identified about a dozen that surfaced during our trip.

1.     Tiara. Why was the woman on the flight to Chicago, two rows in front of us, wearing one?

2.     From the Agatha Christie novel I read on that Chicago flight: Cheese-paring, meaning stingy or niggardly, and hole and corner, meaning an attempt to avoid notice or something secret.

3.     Also from Agatha: Chasseur, a soldier trained for rapid movement, especially in the French army.

4.     Somehow the question arose, “What’s a collective noun for dinosaurs?” Google says: “There is no single scientific term for a group of dinosaurs, as they are usually referred to by standard collective nouns based on their behavior, such as a herd of herbivores (e.g., sauropods) or a pack of hunters (e.g., raptors).”

5.     Personal belongings. On several flights, this recurring irritant: What other belongings do I have?

6.     “Too often we have strayed…” Another recurring irritant, from the prayer of confession in church. As with “there are too many accidental gun deaths…,” how many times of straying or gun deaths are acceptable?

7.     Chugga-chugga choo-choo, a refrain as our human train made its way endlessly around the back yard.

8.     Arepas: What we had for lunch at a Peruvian restaurant, defined as a grilled cornmeal cake, often filled with meat.

9.     In the Mary Oliver book, Upstream, read on the way home: scute, an external bony or horny plate, like those on tortoises.

10.  And one I can be sure you haven’t heard, Permoop: a word invented by either Hazel or Sophie, that she said means someone who falls in the toilet.

[300 words]