Saturday, July 02, 2005

Putting in a word: word tag

"Word tag" seems to be the latest meme to hit the blogosphere, and I've been tagged by none other than the Greatbong himself. We all have our "favorite" words, words we enjoy using, or which conjures up something in our minds. Here are some of mine!

1) erudite: learned.
Many people know I just love that word. It just comes with this feeling of knowledge and learning, a heavy, meaningful word. When you say "erudite scholar", it comes with a world of meaning behind it.

2) pithy: precisely meaningful. Period.

3) phantasmagoria: Fantastic imagery.
I came across this word years ago, while reading some Edgar Allen Poe. And who better to use the word than Poe himself? This word forces the mind to create images.

4) panache: dazzling style!

5) unctuous: Characterized by affected, exaggerated, or insincere earnestness.
This word just oozes slime, and creates the image of a slick haired, puffy faced, artificially-smiling sycophant (qualification for an Indian political party worker?).

6) Supercalifragilistic- expialidocious: OK, I know that's not a real word. But, when I was around 7 years old, I saw "Mary Poppins", thought it was a real word, and went around for days singing the song (driving my parents nuts). Strangely, this imaginary word got me interested in words and I haven't stopped learning about words and their origins since. It also made me discover ridiculous real words like antidisestablishmentarianism.

I'm not going to word-tag any body, because there are too many magnificent word smiths out there. But I invite any of my readers to take up this new meme, and spread the "good word".

Have a fantastic 4th of July weekend (if you're in the States), and I'll be back later next week.

2 comments:

Sunil said...

Thanks Anand for adding me to the list!!

Srikanth said...

Wonderful choice of words and very interesting reasons!