I've been on a one post a week thing lately, which while consistent, it is also a bit on the low side for a blog. So I am posting today (two whole days before the one week mark!) with a posting that what it lacks in having a main thesis or idea, makes it up in having lots and lots of links! That's right - it's time for another blonk.
Today's blonk, in keeping with this blog's overall writing theme and in honor of my own made-up term of "blonking", begins with looking at the beauty of sniglets - which is a made-up word to describe other made-up words that should appear in the dictionary, but don't.
Part of writing is having fun with langauge, and sometimes when you are in the middle of a scene and suddenly you can't think of that word you just need for your sentence, and bits of the word keep floating up in your mind, but when you try to grab them it is like trying to catch dust motes wafting through sunlight - well, then it doesn't seem like much fun. That's the beauty of sniglets - they're just a silly good time. Some of my favorites include:
Arachnidiot (ar ak ni' di ot) - n. A person, who, having wandered into an "invisible" spider web, begins gyrating and flailing about wildly. (The porch off my apartment is a spider resort. Every night I can look out and see them sipping at their dead-fly daquiries, and come the morning when I have to go out and water my plants - the wild flailing inevitably begins.)
Brattled (brat' uld) - adj. The unsettling feeling, at a stoplight, that the busload of kids that just pulled up beside you is making fun of you. (I rode the bus until midway through high school and can actually not remember one incidence of noticing any other cars on the road at all - unless they contained other students that someone knew. Nonetheless, I do still get brattled, probably because I remember those brats on the bus so well...)
Oreosis (awr ee oh' sis) - n. The practice of eating the cream center of an Oreo before eating the cookie outsides. (Okay, this one is more of an "awww" cause my son does this - I think it just must be a human instinct thing.)
My other blonk has to do with the age-old debate over what to call insanely sugary carbonated beverages, and awesomely enough has been captured in map form. Now I grew up in a household and area that were clearly pro-pop. That place is Buffalo, NY and we pronounced the word "pop" like we say most things - through our noses. For some reason in my early college years, I decided it was more cool, mature, and/or cosmopolitan to refer to it as soda, and have continued to do so until this past summer when I was visiting my family and heard my mom ask me, my sisters, my son, my nieces, everyone else about a hundred times if they wanted any pop. And for some reason when I returned home, it stuck in my head, and now when I open my mouth to say soda, the word pop comes out instead. I am sure this says something very revealing about me... but I'm not quite sure what exactly that is.
Okay, that's all of my blonks for today, but I am adding another element to these free-form posts called Read this NOW!
This new section was inspired by my former post of the same name. I was going to call it recommended reading, but that sounds too laid back for the books that I want to talk about which are ones that have grabbed me from the first page and refused to let go until I finished the entire book - sometimes only hours later. These are the type of books that if I got them from the library, I want to own them, so that I can read them again and again. These are also the books I want everyone I meet to read, so they can feel what I feel - just don't expect me to lend you my new copy - I am a book grinch.
The first book in Read this NOW! is an older one - Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt. Talk about grabbing me from the first page - It was probably almost ten years ago, but I can still remember with perfect clarity the exact place I was standing in the bookstore (that is now closed) and the display of paperback books that Angela's Ashes was sitting among. This was at a time when I had no interest in reading anything other than fiction, but when I picked up the book and read the first paragraph I was converted - instantly and irrevocably. Since then the world of non-fiction has opened up to me, and I have a much richer reading life because of it - but Angela's Ashes started it all. If you haven't read it - at least follow the amazon link above and read that first page and see if it hits you as hard as it did me... Read it NOW!
