Notes, Notings, and Common Refrains

1. Delicious: I like thinking of delicious things, of course. And I like how the word can be used to describe other pleasurable, if intangible, experiences, such as: delicious revenge, or: delicious beauty. But mostly, I love the way you have to roll your tongue around inside your mouth when you say it, as if you were eating ice cream and fudge sauce.



2. Jolly: My grandmother (father's mother) Josie would use this word for almost everything that made her happy; sitting down to dinner (sometimes at a holiday feast, but also just a family visit), for example, with the folded napkins and silverware all laid out, would elicit the response of: "Oh my, Dear! How jolly!" Or sitting by lake, with the sun reflecting off the water, would get the same assessment. "Jolly" also sounds more playful (to my ear) than "cheerful," or "happy; it's got some "jump" and "joy" mixed in, too.



3. Googolplex: This means: "The numeral one followed by a googol of zeros." A "Googol" is "Ten to the Hundreth Power" or 10¹⁰⁰ (it was also the name the inventors of the Google search engine were aiming for, but they misspelled it). So a Googolplex is: 10¹⁰¹⁰⁰. When I was small, and mother would be putting me to bed, we'd have this game of "I love you one," "I love you two," "...five," "...twenty," etc. Eventually, we'd jump up to: "I love you a googol," and: "I love you a googolplex." I will always associate the word with the image of my mother's silhouette in my bedroom doorway. Plus, it's a fun and silly-sounding word to say.



4. bed: This is the word that helped me remember the difference between lowercase "b" and lowercase "d." If you think of the as a picture of what it means, then bed gives a human plenty of room to sleep, but deb would force them to squunch up most uncomfortably.



5. Sesquipedalian: This means either: "A person who uses long words," or simply: "A long word." According to Wiktionary, it comes from the Latin for: "a foot and a half." So a "sesquipedal sesquipalian" would be a "Very short person who uses very long words." I just love that the word is so self-referential. "Monosyllabic" most definitely is not.

I was watching TV, and Manda-bear was sleeping on a chair nearby. She wakes up, glances over at me, and starts rattling off a longish sentance (or maybe a paragraph) in Meaowese. I go over and scritch her, and she continues, just commenting on the state of things. :-)

I go into the guest room, to brace myself against the end of the bed to scoot back in my chair. Trixie is there sleeping on the bed. I say: "Hello!" to her, and she stretches, and climbs into my lap and gives me whisker-kisses all over my face.