It’s Furious Balancing

To quote Hamlet.¹

I’ve discovered another utter time sink on the Internet.² It’s a lovely little site known as Wordie. The sole purpose of Wordie is for linguistic nutcases (like myself) to make lists of words for no real reason whatsoever except to say “These are the words I think are really, really cool.”³ Well, this could also appeal to compulsive list makers, whose ranks I do not inhabit, but anyway…

This is a common disorder among bibliophiles — the love of words for the sake of being words. I find it hard to describe. My mind is hard-wired to be attracted to language, to play with language, to revel in wild verbal abandon. Hey, I’m a paid subscriber to VisualThesaurus.com, what can I say? One of the best birthday presents I ever received was my Compact Oxford English Dictionary.⁴

I’m far too distracted by this new toy to write a coherent blog post. If you’re curious, you can find my catch-all, multi-purpose word list here. Sub-lists will form. I already have one over there entitled “Words I Discovered on My Way to Looking Up Other Words.”⁵

1. To Polonius, somewhere in Act 2. I think. [↩]
2. Via Yahoo! Picks, no less. [↩]
3. Or, “These are words I hate,” or “These are words that [fill in the blank.] [↩]
4. From The Husband, together with a dictionary stand. I just about danced around the room. Squealing. I think I hugged it. When I’m wealthy, I’ll buy the multi-volume set. [↩]
5. Unfortunately, Wordie isn’t organized so that you can have one, large, all-purpose list with notations on certain words that they belong in sub-lists. A word may appear in only one list. Period. I can’t see the rationale behind this, since we verbal types can be fanatical with cross-referencing. Perhaps it was structured that way to keep people from going overboard. This rankles. [↩]

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 29th, 2007 at 6:50 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.