sundae

i just heard a new word - showmance. apparently this is a romance or the pretense of romance that develops on a reality show where strangers are thrown together in close proximity. showmance. sheesh. i also learned the word aspidistra today. i sort of guessed what it meant from the context, but i wasn't sure and didn't know specifically what kind of the thing it is of the kind of thing it is. if you know what i mean there. at any rate, i looked it up, which is the best way to find out what something means. well, if you are me, you look it up. if you are other people, you ask me because the words other people don't know are words that i know, and the words i don't know are really obscure and difficult because i am brilliant. and, modest. and, really fun to be with all-around, because nothing spells fun like dictionary breath.

do you ever play the word power game in reader's digest? yeah, i generally score like 18 or so out of 20. usually there are a couple words on there that i have heard of and i have a vague idea what they mean, but i don't nail it down to quite the right answer. sometimes i'll think the word means the exact opposite of what it means, either because i learned it from context and got the context wrong, or from the sound of the word. an example of the latter is pulchritude which sounds ugly but means beauty.

the former can happen when the word is the heart of the sentence and you make an assumption to complete the sentence. like, "jojo moved the aspidistra to the starboard side in order to reach the wall behind it." if you didn't know that starboard meant right-hand, you might just guess and get it wrong since the context doesn't really help you out any. not a big deal in most cases, but say it's like, "jojo enjoyed philippe's obtuse comments." and from that you could think obtuse means helpful when it really means intensely amusing. if you can't agree that's what it means, then you don't know anything about humour.