500 words in 500 seconds
OK. 500 words in 500 seconds. Cindy has thrown down the gauntlet and I'm responding. Gauntlet… I know that's a kind of glove or something, maybe the glove part of a suit of armor… But why would someone throwing it down be seen as an insult? Dude, that sounds more like an opening to me, a weak spot. Maybe it was an opening in a taunting "Neener neener" kind of way, "Hey, I'm open, come get me you big wuss," kind of thing. Anyway, here I am, responding with my own charge at full tilt, on my beige industrial computer horse, mental javelin pointed right at you. Watch out Cindy, here I come.
I'm always a bit amused at how these expressions end up in our language. Someday I really want to own the OED (Oxford English Dictionary), but mostly, that's just because really what I wish is that I could have written it, done the research for it. Yes, that's the kind of things that just makes me get a mental wet-on (you know, the girl equivalent of a hard-on. Don't worry, it'll be the coolest phrase ever someday, I just know it.)
So anyway, yeah, word research just makes me swoony. It's so weird the origins of expressions; thumbing through Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is always my favorite random way to kill a few hours. It's astounding how many came from Shakespeare. Makes you wonder, did he actually coin that phrase or was he just the first guy to write it down and have it survive to the nineteenth century? Does anyone really ever coin a phrase? Do people think about it? I mean, I like to think I made up the word 'flaid' as a combination of flannel and plaid, but I'm sure some of my friends at the time would probably quibble with that. I mean, who knows from whence it popped into my brain? Did someone else say it before? I don't think so, but I can't be positive. I wonder if Shakespeare has the same doubts. Then again, he probably never sat around thinking "Hmm, am I making up a new word? Is that ok? Did I hear Bob down the street say this last week when we were talking about beer? Will he be mad if I use it in my play? Ah well, maybe I'll just name one of the characters after him, or let him play one of the parts and then he won't even think about it." I mean, it's not like good old Willy knew his plays were going to be preserved over all others as the epitome of English theater for all time. Otherwise I bet he would have been a lot more careful in what he wrote and making sure things got preserved better. Recently-ish, I read The Professor and The Madman, that book about the compiling of the OED. It was pretty neat, to me, being fascinated by words, but left me wanting more. I mean, sure it's interesting that some guy just flipped out and killed someone and went mad and had to be locked up, but I'd really rather hear ** the side of the guy who was sane. I wish I was him. Maybe I was him in a past life. That would explain where my frustrated amateur linguist dreams originate. So anyway, 500 random words about words in 500 seconds. (I stopped at the ** when the timer went off and the word count is 525. But then I had to finish my thought.)