More Words We Like

Sorry, running behind lately. Here's the second round of favorite words, with more to come in a couple of days.

PETER WILLIAM WARN, Eplovejoy at Epinions.com:

Pulchritude: It means beauty but it sounds harsh, even ugly. I like the contradiction so much that I don't even mind that I missed the word on the SAT.

Kaleidoscopic: It is probably on its way to becoming obsolete, as is the toy, but for now it remains wonderfully evocative of colors and motion.

Dolt: Its sound alone makes it an effective insult. One doesn't need to know its meaning to know that it probably is not meant nicely.


GENE SMITH of Frowbiz

"Uf?" I hear you say, quotation marks and all.

Yes. Uf.

Uf is the way my daughter Camilla used to say 'if.'

As in: "Uf I ask you a question, Daddy, about something I want, and then
you can say yes or no."

I wrote when she was small that I would know she was growing up when she no longer said "uf."

And she no longer does.

And I miss it.


PATTI ALIVENTI, AKA AliventiAsylum at Epinions.com

Hmm, my favorite word? That's a tough one. Sometimes it's PAYDAY. Sometimes it's FREE.

More often than not it's something as simple as HELLO. A nice way to know someone sees you as another being in the world.

Of course, as I work into the wee hours of the morning, SLEEP is enticing ;-)


JACK SILVIA: Favorite words? What's up with this? Would any sane writer pick out particular words as their favorites? How many of us know in advance, the twists and turns our plot lines are likely to take?

Picking favorite words, and therefore risking pissing off other words on the short list that failed to make the final cut, leaves you exposed to the possibility that somewhere in your story line a sudden twist might occur leaving you with no appropriate word to use.

Here I am, cranking away at my novel and the heroine has just slipped over the edge of a cliff. Now suppose my short list of favorite words included "growing" and "erupting" and for some reason (certainly not one that would be clear to me) I was foolish enough to choose "erupting". "Growing" goes off in a huff and my lexicon now has "This space for rent" nestled between "grower" and "growl." Meanwhile, back to my novel, my heroine is plummeting off the cliff and, according to my outline, she reaches out her hand and grabs frantically for a small tree "erupting" from the face of the cliff. Contrary to my original plan for my plot line, my heroine is now blown far out to sea, a condition that leaves her conspicuously absent for the next four or five chapters.

Did I mention anthropomorphizing?


NANCY ANDERSON, ex-Newsday editor: One of my favorite words is "doppleganger." I'm not sure why. I just think it's a fun word. I also like the word "counterintuitive" because I like to think of myself as a fairly logical person, and sometimes things are just counterintuitive.