A Few of My Favorite Words
My love of language started early.
My family loved words. My father and older siblings and mothers played Scrabble often. My mother read constantly, barricading herself in her room with books so long I couldn’t grab them with my tiny child hands. The bigger the book, the more likely she was to read it. My sister has been writing her whole life, mostly poetry. So it should be no surprise that I also have the word bug.
As a child, I excelled at puzzles and games. One of my favorites was a Memory game I played mostly with my grandmother. Memory consisted of sets of thick, square pieces of cardboard with a picture on one side, two pieces each per picture. To play, you’d place the pieces face down in a grid - 4 x 4, 5 x 5, 10 x 10. however much time you had. And you’d flip one over and then flip a 2nd over to try to match it. If you uncovered a matched set, you removed those from the board.
At first, you had to flip pieces over just to familiarize yourself with where the pictures were in the grid. And then you could start targeting the pictures when you uncovered a particular picture. One of my favorite pictures was of a “peacock.”
I’m not entirely sure how I got obsessed with peacocks. At the Hart Ranch north of Los Angeles, we’d have Easter picnics, and they had ratty-looking buffalos in a stable and wild peacocks roaming the grounds. I also remember seeing them walk around freely at the L.A. Zoo. During 6th grade, we had a zoo fieldtrip, and some of my classmates got in trouble for plucking peacock tail feathers from living birds! I wasn’t one of those kids.
But it was the sound of the word that attracted me the most - the “eeeee” sounds and the hard “k” sound at the end. Somewhere along the line I learned to not only say this word but sing it or chant it, annoyingly so. When I got the peacock memory pieces, I’d shout “peacock! peacock! peacock! peacock! peacock! peacock!….” (I think as if I were a peacock squawking!) in a steady rhythmic way, much to the dismay of my family. I do remember stern looks and occasionally a “stop that!” but saying that word delighted me so much, that they didn’t want to take my joy away. We had an unwritten rule in our house to never tell anyone to “shut up.” There was a value on personal expression, and we were taught to respect other people’s rights to speak.
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In that same era, I started preschool when I was 3 and kindergarten when I was 4. I had a November birthday, so my age changed to be the appropriate school age. Thus, most of my classmates were a little older than me.
Somewhere along the way, I learned the word “nincompoop.” I have no idea where I picked it up, but it quickly became one of my favorite words. One day I came home from school, and my grandmother, whose way of telling me what to do was usually by grabbing my arm and pulling me somewhere, or, if she was angry, pulling my earlobe to get me to go with her to get my attention. I wasn’t happy with her. Sraight up, I let fly with a “You nincompoop!” with a forceful POP! at the end of the word. What a great feeling for a word to match one’s emotions!
Gramie wrenched my arm and dragged me to the bathroom. It’s the first and only time I had my mouth washed out with soap. And while we didn’t do a lot of, if any, corporal punishment in our house, Gramie’s punishment didn’t deter me from liking the word “nincompoop” for the rest of my life. I may not have called anyone a “nincompoop” ever again, but I found ways to use the word when it was more appropriate.
Other words I found enchanting were “serendipity” (the first sailboat I bought as an adult some 40 years later carried that name, a sign from the ocean gods, I figured); and “supercalifragilisticexpealidocious,” which I learned to say backwards as well - “docious alie expe istic fragi cali rupus” - but that’s going a bit too far - indubitably!
Okay, readers - it’s your turn. What words make you do somersaults and skip? Which words fascinate or horrify you, or make you feel like you have a mouthful of sugar? Let me know in the comments below!
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On this substack, I write about:
writing, literature, and the writing life
writing process
memoir craft
mental illness - major depressive disorder, suicide, borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder
sailing
alternative lifestyles - polyamory and kink
As always, thank you for reading. Comments are appreciated. Let me know what you think. Let’s get to know each other.
Until next time, I’ll . . .
Just keep writing!
Lee, I'm so glad to have made the UNM connection with you! Thanks for signing up for my substack. As you can see, I've neglected it. Maybe you will inspire me to post more often.
My mother washed my mouth with soap once, or tried to. I believe my infraction was a stronger curse word than nincompoop though. What a strange thing to do, when you think about it. Did it really get the dirty language out of our mouths? And what got that practice started?
Well, if you can say peacock over and over I don't see how you can be prejudiced against a poor parrot :)
No favorite words come to mind. Probably because they come and go. These days I'm more aware of words becoming unfavorites, like when a regular word gets hijacked and adopted as a default. At times I think if I hear, "absolutely," or "Perfect," once more in a conversation I'll have a conniption fit, a term my mother often used that I later learned meant stroke.