Good Words

I'll admit it. I'm an unabashed, unrepentant logophile. I love various words for sundry reasons: some because of the way they look, some because of the way they sound, and some because they flow, to paraphrase Prince Hamlet, trippingly off the tongue. Allow me to give some examples. I would be hard pressed to cite a prettier looking word than miasma. Other attractive looking words are scimitar, xenophobic, xylophone, xylem, zeppelin, and zephyr. Do you think there is something about X and Y that I like? A sampling of words which have a sweet sound to me includes enigma, protocol, aplomb, etui, myopia, myopic, eclectic [lots of clicking], cabal, hombre, spilt [not split {think of milk}], hewn, and its more crass cousin sawn, tryst, abbesses [lots of hissing], torque. Exemplars of words which flow trippingly off the tongue are chicanery, loquacious, sychophancy, pizzicato, and ubiquitous. Some words, such as chic and abyss, delight both eye and ear.

There are some words which sound like their meaning. Prime examples would be abut and scofflaw. [Don't you just love that one? Its beauty is in its usefulness.] Others in this catagory include redundancy, angst [don't you begin to feel uneasy just looking at the word?], exacerbate, and crap [not as an expletive, but as a descriptive noun]. In fact, if you think of a cow patty hitting the ground in a pasture on a warm summer afternoon, the last one almost becomes an onomatopoeia.

At least one word, fjord, is in a category all by itself. Can you believe the audacity of using a minor consonant as a vowel? A word you might expect to be on my list is rhythm. But, alas, I cannot call it a good word, because more than fifty years after meeting it, I still cannot consistently remember how to spell it. And for someone who is a good speller, that's a little bit embarrassing.

My favorite word of all time is one that has no known meaning. It is Biafra. It was the name of a country from 1967 into 1970, which, similar to the Confederate States of America, seceded from and lost a civil war to Nigeria. Before, during and after the country existed, the Bight of Biafra is the curve in the coast including Nigeria and Cameroon, and the bay formed by same. And whether you pronounce the first "a" as in after or as in father, I like it equally well.

This is by no means an exhaustive list. I will think of others, as will you. It is, rather, a glimpse for you into the way my twisted mind works.

Oh, I almost forgot a good word - chocolate. Well, okay, there is nothing special about the word, but what it stands for certainly is super special.