Yesterday someone said to me, “I like it when you come in
for your appointments. I always learn a new word.” That felt better than
someone telling me I look AH-MAY-Zing (which isn’t a regular occurrence and therefore
may not be a valid comparison, but still…)
It’s not that I set out to teach anyone new words. In fact,
I'm usually the one learning them. It’s a natural consequence of reading. As an
early reader, my fascination with words was immediate. At my first university (University
of Melbourne, leafy trees, lush lawns, sandstone, and that horrible Redmond
Barry building) I became engrossed in linguistics.
Words and language have
always captivated me. The home I grew up was multilingual (English, Italian,
Croatian – Dad has a smattering of Spanish and German) and there was an
emphasis on reading. My mother was the one who stacked our bookshelves with encyclopaedias
and, in 1959 as gift for my father, purchased a Webster’s Dictionary, through
which he perfected his English; enough to found an inaugural interpreters’ association
and regular work in the Supreme Court. He still has that dictionary. The cover
imprint is faded and the pages well-worn. For me, it’s the best book on his bookshelf.
Recently, I've been reading more academic literature. It feels
like I have to stop every few minutes to look up something new. I love it! I'm drawn
to documentaries on the English language. (Try the DVD series The Adventures of English for a short
entertaining look at its origins and history). I admit I can grate on people’s nerves
but I'm not giving up my passion. There is something deeply existential about
finding exactly the right words for what we need to say to one another, in the right
way. That’s why I like the succinctness of Twitter as much as I love the hardcover printed tomes
on my bookshelf.
Those around me are regularly driven crazy by my discovery
of a new word that sends me to the dictionary, scouring for meaning and origins. I
have a word blog, not a food blog, because words are more delicious to me. I like
to mix them, roll the syllables and sounds around my mouth, test them out loud,
listen to the cadence, bake them into sentences. It’s almost word porn.
I'm an unashamed, logophile, a verbivore, a verbomaniac
even. Interestingly, when I ran the spell
check on this piece, Microsoft Word edited ‘logophile’ to ‘loophole’.
Funny that. When you love words, there isn’t one.
