Words

It’s actually weird that since I mainly communicate here with words, that I haven’t talked about my medium of choice yet. I like words. Don’t know when I started to like words, but it must have been early in my reading career. Weirdly enough, some of my favourite words are not in my native language. Triskaedekaphobia is the fear of the number 13 and it’s such a delightful word. It really flows. Verisimilitude is another one that I like, just because of the sound, not necessarily of the meaning.

l love finding out what words mean or where they come from. I have a few books on etymology. I bought them because they were cheap and because they were highly likely interesting, exactly what I look for in books.

Do you also have a word that you hate so much the look of and the feeling that you just can not deal with it? I have one such word. The word that actually prompted this article, this sharing of feelings about words. I was reading “Writing to learn” by William Zinsser and how beautiful the passages were by scientists and other folks on their given subject (that had nothing to do with writing in general) and then you have this word. The word used by people that ARE connected to books and writing. A word that if I see it, I want nothing to do with the thing it is trying to get me sold on. The word in question? have I piqued your interest long enough for you to know my most hated word?

Unputdownable.

That’s it. That’s the one. There is no way in hell that you would use that in a sentence and think of yourself that you wrote a beautiful, eloquent sentence. “the book was unputdownable.” It makes me cringe even writing this one. “The book was gripping”, “the book was beautiful”, “the book was anything but unputdownable”. Any other word could be used to describe a book and it would be better than unputdownable. My reaction to the word is so bad that if I see it on a page for a book, I don’t buy the book, even if it might have interested me a little bit before. Nope. Not going to promote that kind of word usage.

Is this a bit of word snobbery? Absolutely. Is it justified? Yes. Unputdownable is a direct result, in my mind, of people that don’t read broadly enough or are marketing to people that don’t read broadly enough with lazy word choices. (in my humble opinion). Ohh, another word I dislike is simp. but I have written about that one before.