Awesome Word Spotting: Sizzle

Crazy, amusing, and fascinating words are on display in Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages by Ammon Shea. It's actually a fun read for people like me who love words.

Reading that book reminds me to be on the look-out for underused words, the ones that seem to sparkle but aren't as famous or used as much these days.

Here are types of words to watch for:

• A word with meaning that can carry the weight of three or more words;
• Words with enjoyable or interesting connotations;
• Words with aesthetic value in a linguistic sense. To learn more, Microstyle: The Art of Writing Little by Christopher Johnson has a chapter or two on this.

I don't have the patience or interest to hunt for words in dictionaries, but I often end up grabbing a book to read. When I do that, I'll try to be attentive to any words that stand out. Then I'll share them here.

So, the one that I found today is "sizzle"! I haven't read or heard that word in a long time, yet I hear the sound of what it describes a few times a week. This word caught my eye in Unfashionable by Tullian Tchividjian, "... the sizzle of this world ..." (page 19).

Editorial Jargon

Words can take on new life in different jobs. For instance, the word "deck" for magazine/online editors most often does not refer to something attached to a house or apartment. If you hear that word in an editorial office, it most likely means the line below the title and above the line that mentions the author. You won't see one for this blog post because Blogger either doesn't have that option or I haven't found how to enable the field for it yet.

There are other words editors use that are used uniquely compared to normal usage. This is only a small list that doesn't include all of them:

-Byline - The author line.
-Style- There are a few reference books that editors use to find out how things should appear called style guides. Examples of how these might be used are when an editor wants to know whether or not to spell out numbers and to add a comma in a list before "and" or "but". What the editor decides most of the time depends on the style guide that a publication uses.
-Blackprint - The printer sends a sample of what it will print in a black and white format. Editors can then check if all the pages are in order, if there are any printer mistakes, and might even proofread the whole edition again. Any changes that are needed will likely cost a fee.

Shelter from Rain

Yesterday I was picking up items for work during the workday. As soon as I was at the check-out, a thunder clap rang loud outside and pouring rain started falling heavily. These were thick rain drops.

I unsuccessfully tried to avoid being soaked, but as I transferred items from my shopping cart into the trunk, I noticed I could hide under the hatchback. Of all places! Shelter from rain can be found under the hood of my trunk. And I am tall.

This is the first hatchback car I've owned. It not only looks cool (or like an alien-like car, you chose), it's a place to try to save yourself from looking silly when you return to work if it happens to start pouring.

Hoarding Words

A strange thought that often goes through my mind when I think about writing here is: Hey, wait a minute, maybe you should not write this but keep it in your mind for later--you might be able to take this and add it to other ideas later for a book someday! I start to think, sure, let's not write today. But I am so bad at keeping notes or a notebook of writing ideas like Anne Lamott does and recommends in Bird by Bird.

I re-read an old post of mine that got the most pageviews so far, and it was a beautiful thought about noise in a coffee shop. I don't think I've thought of that since. I would have just a lost beautiful thought if I hadn't  written it down three years ago.

So I'm starting to think if I don't write in my blog what I'm thinking might be fun to write, then I will loose that beautiful (ahem, or slightly mediocre but interesting) piece of writing! Which would honestly be okay, but less fun. I could keep a notebook or notes but the odds are that I probably won't and might loose the notes/notebook, but I do find more motivation to just write here.

I'm sharing this with you in case you have that thought that is probably procrastination telling you to not work today! Be encouraged. Just write it down. Probably what you write will do two things:

1. Every time you write, writing gets a slightly, slightly bit easier.
2. It most likely  will provide a springboard for more beautiful or interesting thoughts to write down!

And I guess you might be encouraged that you did write something down once and it looked okay--so it'll be motivation to keep it up.

"It's Never Perfect"

At the end of Super Bowl 2013, when the media asked the winning Ravens coach John Harbaugh questions, he said this:  "We tell our players all the time, 'It's never pretty. It's never perfect. But it is us.' And that was us today. Just the way we do it."

That is soothing to a perfectionist's ears. No, we're not perfect. And when it's not pretty, there is still tomorrow or the next minute, and in the end we may still win the game!

English History and Linguistics

In college I had a requirement to take either a history of English language course or a linguistics course. I heard that in linguistics you had to make noises together to learn how people pronounce things. I picked the history of English language course, opting to shyly sit silently and almost anonymously, like in all my other classes.

I never thought I'd learn about linguistics after that. But, somehow, picking up a history of English language book, The English Language: A Guided Tour of the Language by David Crystal, brought me there! English language history involves linguistics! And linguistics is part of the travel of languages. It's fun to learn about how other cultures interpret and make English their own.

Crystal points out a helpful way to think about all the grammar books out there. Do we (Americans) know grammar? We know more than you probably think! If English is your native language, you probably know a load of grammar, he says. Really. A whole lot of grammar has to do with syntax, which we know naturally.

It's encouraging and fun. Liberating even, to know that you can just have fun and enjoy what you write, instead of, after every couple words, wondering if it is perfectly meeting many rules that may differ by gammar book.

I'm hoping to read and write more just for fun. It's easy to get caught up in wanting to make things perfect and wanting to know the exact purpose/end of something.

You know you've been working too long on your company's blog when ...

When trying to try in a blog web address, you type part of it as ".blogpost.com" instead of "blogspot.com."

I feel like I've written a lot of emails with the words "blog post" to the blog editor recently at work. Today's the first time I've "mispelled" the URL that way.