VAGINA! No Fear of Words, Please. Hey, that post was about a book also!
April 29, 2016, just into my second year writing this blog:
“Sexuality can be hard to talk about. I think this is true for adults far more than for children. Children are naturally curious and nonjudgmental. They just want to know, what is that, what’s it for, why are yours different from mine, and why does he have one of those and I don’t? It’s we adults who squirm and dodge, deflect and bolt. From a very early age, children learn that it’s not okay to talk about certain things because it makes the grown-ups uncomfortable. I want to change that.”
I still like that one.
The kids were 13 and 9 then. Holy cow, that was a lifetime ago. And here I am, still writing, trafficking in words every day and loving it even more, if that’s possible!
What role(s) do(es) word(s) play in your life?
Thank you for reading mine! I write them for myself, so it’s always a treat to have someone else interact with them.
Today I have listened to yet another new song on loop: Fucking Shit, Holy Shit by Shards of Art. I have yet to listen to their other work; I have a feeling I may love it all. Profane choral soft rock, I’d call it. Fucking fantastic–or fanfuckingtastic? I shared it with a patient today who’s been through it lately, and turns out he’s also been playing it on loop for the past month already. Cosmic.
It reminds me of a book I listened to this summer, What the F by Benjamin K Bergen, subtitled, What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves. My memory of this book will be forever associated with the pottery studio, listening while throwing, trimming, and generally loving life. If you’re interested in history, linguistics, and culture, it’s an easy and fascinating listen. I didn’t enter any bookmarks in the audiobook, likely because I was wrist-deep in clay, but I appreciated the distinctions he made in levels of profanity and how they relate to various social taboos and verbal development in children, among other things. Well worth an Everand unlock or Audible credit!
So who else loves the @vocabulary.daily.words account on Instagram?
Petrichor.
I liked enough of their posts to check out the app and have now paid to practice my words daily for the past 30 days. Nerding out and proud of it, I say! Whodathunk I’d voluntarily subject myself at this age to the SAT vocab practice we all had to do in high school? I get on every day to see if I can maintain my 98% practice score. Repetition, my friends: It works.
Forelsket. Amatory.
Erstwhile! I never actually knew what it meant, or for that matter, philistine either. Did any of you ever follow The Erstwhile Philistine? I really enjoyed the posts there before they ended in 2015. I pulled out ‘erstwhile nemesis’ for the Worthy Rivals post the other night thanks to my new vocab practice–win! Not sure when I’ll ever use duteous or mammillaria in a sentence but whatever, I’m having fun.
How gratifying to know I have a whole boatload of words from which to tweezerpluck the perfect one I need to express exactly what I think or feel with laser accuracy! And that if I don’t know the word yet, it likely already exists, if not in English then in another language (the app also includes foreign language words, which I love). Awesome.
May you always find the words you need, my friends. May words always be your friends. And may you never fear hearing, speaking, or using your words to make the world better!
