I love words. I love everything about them: Their history, their power, the emotion they engender that’s otherwise inaccessible, the profound joy of the 
lines on a clean page, the sound they make spoken aloud, the sheer creativeness of mixing them together and how every single time they give miraculous birth to something brand new. My idea of a good time is an eccentric friend and an American Heritage College Dictionary; opening it at random, pointing blindly on the page to select a new word, reading aloud the meaning of curious and obscure words. The pictures along the borders make this tome feel complete, an absolute sensational experience. It is my favorite dictionary and a favorite toy. 
But some words just don’t seem to fit their designated meaning. Some seem to just beg to imply something else. Like Penultimate used as a pun by me in a previous post, but what should clearly mean the ultimate-ultimate. Duh. “Second to last”?! Really? I don’t think so and I have never ever heard anybody utter that word. It’s fated to non-use because its definition is just plain wrong.
There are others with similar fates. We can rescue them though from their unfortunate designations and give them new life by affixing their proper meaning. I’d love to hear yours. Here are a few of mine.
Behoove – 1. To become hoofed like the devil; to affiliate oneself with the devil in an attempt to fit in, slide, or sneak by. 2. To pretend allegiance for one’s own benefit or survival.
It would behoove you to pretend to love that new form your boss made up.Chaplet – A diminutive British man. That chaplet seems to be looking up the ladies’ dresses.Podium – 1. A sad or regretful day. 2. A day without monetary means. This is a podium indeed.
Concerted – 1. To have been taken to a concert, or a show, without one’s willingness. 2. To be compelled unwillingly into a chore or task by another. Harry was concerted into visiting his mother in law.
Dispirit - 1. To make fun of a spirit while it is in corporeal form. 2. Slang, to reference a specific spirit as opposed to another.
No, it’s dispirit over here that’s making all the ruckus.
Robust – 1. A particularly firm bust on a female; a bust a female acquires through rowing (thought to have derived from female rowing teams). 2. Regional, thought to denote small breasts, ‘fish egg’ size.
Now that is a robust!
Parchment – To be in a particularly dire state of thirst
After the desert hike, Harry sure was in a parchment.
Parataxis – A little known tax deduction available only to couples. All but non-existent in modern times since the great Singles Revolt of ’87.
Poor Harry no longer could claim a parataxis after the divorce.
Parapraxis – Often confused with “parataxis” but actually denotes a highly successful form of physical humor known as “slapstick” in which one act or “joke” quickly follows another, tying the two acts together. Anecdotal; a movement know as The Age of the Three Stooges attempted to add a third act to this complex repertoire, without success. It is a tenant of Stoogestorians that this was the reason the group could never successfully retain a consistent character known as “Curly.”
Only Moe and Larry could really pull off a successful parapraxis.
Bellboy – Male spawn of Quasimodo
Nobody knew who in the world could possibly be the bellboy’s mother.
Sickle – A person that calls in sick to work frequently. Often assumed to be feigned sickness or symptoms.
My new boss is a real sickle.
Sycophant – A rapidly expanding species of an elephant-snake hybrid typically found in the badlands of America Corporateland that is known to be particularly ingratiating and accommodating. Folklore; it is rumored that sightings have been made of this creature actually using its own tongue to lick up messes made by its owners.
The sycophant rushed in at the close of the meeting to loudly proclaim his allegiance to the New Form just proposed by the manager.
Sidereal – The side of a ‘two-faced’ person thought to be the genuine or authentic person or personality.
She may fool others, but Harry believed he knew the sidereal of Nancy.
Soporific – A widely popular or well-done daytime television show commonly known as “Soap Operas”.
Ever since the new soporific hit the air, Harry’s life took on new meaning.
I had a crisis of faith recently with the book I am writing. I experienced the first significant pangs of doubt, and loss of conviction.
After years of flirtation, I was finally in the heady rush of new love; that wonderful, intoxicating stage of discovery, infatuation. I was just learning to talk about her (pronouns suck so I’m goin’ old school traditional), I wanted to 
But the comment stuck. Had it really been so ‘casual’ or was it calculated, more subversive? Without my awareness it worked its devious way under my skin and began its slow journey throughout my extensive path of landmines. Suddenly it was just there – doubt, suspicion. I wasn’t writing any more, I didn’t feel that 
What happens next? Do you continue with what is now just a charade of a relationship? Do you confront angrily, now believing the lie? Or do you just try to put it out of your mind dismissively – it can’t be true. I think the 
And commitment. My favorite thing in the whole of the world, clearly. I still can’t even spell the damn word! But I do know the theory and am striving for the application. Choose something, stick with it and develop it with absolute love and your own voice and vision. The product will reveal and embody that, 
every time. Commitment is the key. Falling in love if easy right? And if you’re in love, then everything should so easily follow, fall into place. But – the theory, the practical application, tells us time and again, that relationships are work. Real work. And you shouldn’t give up on your love just because somebody laces your honey with poison for unfathomable, maybe even unconscious, reasons. They don’t know her like you do; the warmth of her touch in the lonely, cold night; the strength she gives you in the middle of yet another insane workday; her understanding and absolute acceptance of all your trial and error; the meaning she infuses into the weariness of the day to day existence.
So I need to spend some real quality time with my relationship. Get to know her again, decide if what we have has the legs to go the distance. 
This simply takes that commitment; a renewal of vows, continuing from a stronger and much more honest foundation, based on reality and brutal truth – not just passion and infatuation. It’s the next phase of any relationship that endures, where the real work begins.
Yes. I am still in love. I am indebted to her. She makes me want to be a better person, one who actually can commit to something and see it through, face my fears, and provide for her the life I envision. We’re registered at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Office Depot for this renewal of vows and we thank you for your support!
I’ve been remembering childhood lately – thinking about when I didn’t know any better, and what that was like. Not knowing Butler Hill was way too dangerous to roller skate down; having no reason to yet fear the dark; not knowing that I couldn’t adapt Gone with the Wind to a play and perform it with my friends; not knowing I couldn’t just write a book and send it off to a publisher found in the Yellow Pages; and sensing, but not yet knowing, something just wasn’t quite right, that there was resentment, dislike. Not knowing - the wonderful innocence, naivety and fearlessness, before “experience” in the guise of doubt, fear, protection and survival, takes over.
A child learns this fear soon enough. The reason why you can’t do something usually pops right up first when faced with something new. “I can’t” forms a shield, a protective bubble in which we live, that we form around ourselves layer after layer for protection against the brutality of a random universe, the unknown. We can’t just go from having anidea, to acting on that idea as we did when we were young. It’s called maturity, growing up, living in the “real world.” We weigh the consequences; don’t behave rashly, impulsively, on a whim. All bad connotations. But – really? Must everything in life truly be vetted before we can move at all? Hasn’t that protective part of our brain taken over just a bit too much?
I have wanted to write a book all of my life, ever since I can remember. Just like a childhood hero, Harriet the Spy, I would keep a notebook and 
“Everybody wants to do that.” And I was left on the curb, in the dark, utterly alone. 
Somehow I rebounded from that, found a desperate loophole. Ok, if it weren’t my life story, if it were fiction, maybe that is “allowed.” So I did it, I wrote a book. I enlisted the girl next door as illustrator and it was brilliant. It was the achievement of my young lifetime. I didn’t tell anybody this time, but it was exposed and I abruptly discovered “reality” once again, that I “can’t do that.” No one would ever read “that” – that amateurish, pathetic, embarrassing manuscript, stuffed in an envelope addressed in scrawling crayon. In fact, “they” would likely throw it across the room once they saw it – or did it get thrown across the room then? I don’t recall. That was my moment of loss of innocence and the beginning of dissociation as I struggled to reconcile the impossible world in which I existed. I have no recollection from that slap of a moment in time, what happened next. I don’t know whatever became of that child’s manuscript of which she had been 
I’ve been so angry for so long at that little girl, that she wasn’t stronger. I fiercely resent the weakness, that she lost me my dream life, that I have to live every day with the very pathetic knowledge that such a seemingly minor thing so violently impacted her, froze her in veritable stasis for the next 30 years. That I am still picking my way out of that prison, embarrassed to acknowledge such a petty thing won so easily, that I had no resources, no foundation upon which to cling and stay standing up. I want to shake that child by her slumped little shoulders and tell her to stand up, to say “no,” to keep going, to mail that package that was pure love, find somebody who would support the gut instinct, to not give up, to not be so utterly crushed that she is trying to emerge out from under it all still.
It’s time; time to grow up, to know better. So I took a stand, and a million deep breaths, and ‘outed’ myself to some from my past. I claimed aloud the title of 
‘writer’, declared publicly that I am writing. After the various automatic responses – what they gave up when young, what they could have been, how they could have been a writer, an actor, happy, if not for so many things, like me for instance – there was just a glimmer of recognition, recollection, a flash of awareness. Of what happened to me, of the impact the past has had, of what I was accusing now? Or maybe it was my imagination, what I needed to see. I faced my past in the only way I can at this point, with the fervent hope that exposing it to the light of day, acknowledging it at least, will allow me once and for all to escape its rusty, embarrassing chains, and continue on the path started so very long ago. It’s all I can do.
