Words I Don't Know

I'm not sure how I got behind on vocabulary. I didn't realize this void until I met W and quickly found his vocabulary to be superior to mine. Is it a Southern thing? Now I'm profiling, I know, but I can do that since I spent many days playing in the fields barefoot during hot hot summers in the Sunshine State which is technically not the South but I do own 2 pair of cowboy boots which were not purchased in the South either but rather the West so I'm not sure if I'm even on to something here. The Vocab discrepancy, however, usually rears its ugly face during a game of scrabble or more recently, Words With Friends with W. That app will allow you to play all kinds of weird words including ones that are questionable so I never know which ones are real and which ones aren't. My crafty word opponent shot me a look when I laughed after playing a word that I was sure was not a real word but some kind crazy dialect-y adjective and I'm all "I can't believe it let me play that!" He's all, "What are talking about? There's nothing questionable about that word." 

Oh I don't know. I guess I'll have to accept my handicap and compensate in crafts or painting or some other attribute that I am less deficient where I don't find it embarrassing to be a little sub-par. I tried reading books like Moby Dick but after 6 months and somewhere around page 100 I stopped reading it because the characters only just stepped foot on the ship at this point. It's a little too slow and tooooo wordy ie: circumambulation (spell check doesn't even recognize this word). There are so many of these types of words in a sentence or paragraph that it is difficult to grasp the the main idea out of context. Lately I've been reading easy self-help books that lack luster in the vocab area but the Scarlet Letter was AWESOME and not too long that it was intimidating. 

I'll continue to attempt to beef up my word-base but it's a slow process. I'm too old to absorb and too busy to study but I said I'd try.

Merriam-Webster Online's word of the day: scintilla - a very small amount: a spark: a trace