vocabulary

I am in love with words. Seriously. There are so many of them, and they can say so many things.

I am also a big fan of the subtleties and nuances of language; think how much more you are saying when you describe something as "convoluted" rather than just plain old "confusing."

Of course, sometimes I feel like people think I am taking this too far. For example, yesterday, I was trying to come up with a word for my Facebook status to describe just exactly how I was feeling. It was a crummy kind of day, and I was feeling vaguely icky: sleepy, mildly depressed, slightly grumpy and just a tad sick of the world. I found the exact word to describe these symptoms in lassitude: "weariness of body or mind from strain, oppressive climate, etc.; lack of energy; listlessness; languor." But it was a noun with no corresponding adjective, and I wanted an adjective to fit with the "Andrea is" in my Facebook status. (Granted, I could have just said, "Andrea is suffering from a feeling of lassitude," but seriously, that just sounds dumb.) Tasha suggested "lethargic," which was close to what I wanted, but not it exactly. I also could have used "listless" or "languorous," directly from the definition, but those still (in my mind, anyway) did not have the exact connotations I was looking for. I suppose this is probably just me splitting hairs; I think I have a habit of ascribing subtle connotations to words that most people don't. But still!

However (and this is me bragging, pure and simple), I quite enjoy having a reasonably large vocabulary, as well as a smattering of knowledge-bytes from other languages. It means I don't often come across a word in English that is utterly foreign to me, and when I do, I can usually make a reasonable guess as to its meaning based on its parts. For example, I was recently reading and came across this gem: verisimilitude. Fairly straightforward, phonetically speaking, but I had never seen it before in my life. So I thought about it for a moment, glanced over the contextual clues, and formed a hypothesis: "veri-" would be something meaning "truth," as in "verily," from the Latin veritas, and "-similitude" would probably be related to "similar," so "verisimilitude" would mean something like "the quality of being similar to the truth or reality." This made sense in the reading, so I accepted it and continued. Later, I went back and looked it up; according to the American Heritage Dictionary (via Dictionary.com), it is "the quality of appearing to be true or real" or "something that has the appearance of being true or real." Hot damn.