Tuesday, July 03, 2012

Where have all my adjectives gone?

lolcatz give Grammatically Correct Cat a bad name

In the days of yore, my vocabulary was rich with adjectives, nouns, and verbiage unusual for a small child. I recall an occasion with my paternal parental unit, which occurred when I was approximately eight years of age, wherein said paternal unit perchanced to encounter an acquaintance in a local shopping establishment, and they agreed to partake in a congenial hot beverage. The acquaintance remarked of me "Speaks the Queen's own English, don't she?".

As I progressed in years, a robust vocabulary became less charming to adults, and increasingly a topic of incredulity from my peers. The result was the depletion of my store of 'big words', out of fear of ridicule for 'being different'. This atrophy of my vocabulary has increasingly become a detriment to my university paper-writing. As I laboured to produce the two final tomes of the school year, I found my scattered synapses struggling to produce the appropriate descriptors. Words I once bandied with ease slipped through my brain cells like star systems through General Tarkin's fingers.

My lexicography is diminished, depleted, devastated, and decimated. My label of 'voracious reader' which once enabled my thesaurus-like storehouse of words appears to have failed me. The storehouse is dusty, musty, and my terminology rusty. Even Scrabble has failed to keep my synapses sharp, my brain burgeoning, or my vocabulary vivid. This from the girl who read the Encyclopedia Britannica and the thesaurus for fun, and who catalogued list of intriguing words for future use...

On the Herculean-task list for this summer: learn new words!

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