Words

I’ve always loved to play with words, and I come by the enthusiasm honestly. My father used big words rather unnecessarily and pretentiously — he was something of a showoff that way. He quizzed us on definitions and spelling at the dinner table, and turned it into a game.

My mother was a whiz at all word games, including the anagrams in the daily newspaper. I rarely beat her at Boggle or Scrabble. But Terri and I did grow up playing with words for fun. Now I play Boggle with my phone and Upwards online with a friend, but that’s it.

The only word I ever got wrong in a spelling bee was “refrigerator” in the third grade. And my reader’s vocabulary still serves me well. There were times I learned a new word from a book, but got the pronunciation hilariously wrong — like ‘Pénelope’ and ‘épitome.’

I continue to appreciate those clever lists of coined words and funny puns on social media, and memes that get it just right. I might occasionally even share one.

I love organizing other people’s words into books, laying out the pages, styling the typeface, margins, titles, quotations, headers and footers — supporting the words with the right design. 

Best of all, I enjoy editing all manner of writing. I pride myself in maintaining the author’s original and unique voice, while improving the clarity, flow, and grammar of their content. Eliminating undo repetition. Diving into the thesaurus to find the precise word or phrase to best express their intended meaning. Re-organizing when necessary. Re-writing when appropriate. That is, massaging their words to create the best version I can of their original work.

I always said I was an editor, not a writer. Now I am writing my own stuff. And it’s fun and satisfies a creative urge long dormant.

However, these days I am also losing words. Nothing alarming, just the typical course of an aging brain, that gradual cognitive decline that we can resist, but not quite escape. I keep my mind active, continue to learn new things, and exercise my thinking in new ways. But still, the sudden missing word, searching the internal files for the one I know starts with ‘m’ but can’t remember right away. That object I use everyday but give me a moment to think of what to call it. That person I know so well, but their name eludes me just now. I love my words and am not happy about the lapses. But so be it — this is how it is now. It feels so… um… so… so… um…