I am a self-professed lexophile. Sounds serious, doesn’t it. Yep, serious lover of words. I love, love words and spend time learning new words every day. Vocabulary is such a wonderful tool. You can describe things in the most visual and fascinating way or express your exact feelings to someone and they get it.

When someone asks, “How are you today”, whether you are fine or not, you automatically and robotically say “Fine”. That doesn’t say anything about how you are. Why not say one of these affirmations:

I am accomplished
I am admirable
I am exceptional
I am fantastic
I am magnificent
I am outstanding

Or maybe that’s not how you feel at all. Maybe you are down or sad. Then you could answer truthfully and say some of these things:

I am woebegone
I am wistful
I am despondent
I am doleful
I am downcast
I am pensive

Then maybe again you are neither fine or down, you are just feeling mediocre. In that case you could answer with these phrases:

I am passable
I am tolerable
I am fairish
I am indifferent
I am colorless
I’m vanilla

I buy groceries at a small family owned store in my small town. The owner typically hires high School students as checkers. I always ask how they are and if they reply with “fine”, I won’t except it. I ask for a more descriptive word. Sometimes they come up with something else or ask me to share some words which I happily do. Now when they see me coming I know their brains are churning to come with any other word than “fine”.

I have a book, The Thinker’s Thesaurus: Sophisticated Alternatives to Common Words by Peter E. Meltzer. It is fascinatingly filled with words you’ve never heard of to replace those tired old words you’ve been using. I’m not certain I would use any of these but get a load of some synonyms for common words. They are crazy for sure and probably no one will understand if you use them:

fine: galumptious or skookum
fat: abdominous, avoirdupois, fubsy or pyknic
hungry: esurient or edacious
sad: tristful, chapfallen, dysthymic, plangent or saturnine

I told you they were crazy. It makes me remember when a while back I was taking the GRE test to enter Graduate School. The vocabulary section had words like these that you were supposed to define. I started crying at this point in the exam. Luckily I passed but it was a traumatic experience for someone who thought they had a broad vocabulary.

In my quest for yet more synonyms of common words, don’t be surprised if I try out some new ones on you and you have no idea what I am talking about.

You will most certainly think I am tetched!

Until next time, keep learning new words so you are not guilty of malaproprism.*

Clangorously, DeeDee

*malaproprism: Malapropisms differ from other kinds of speaking or writing mistakes, such as eggcorns or spoonerisms, and from the accidental or deliberate production of newly made-up words (neologisms).