Quote of the Moment:

Quote of the Moment: Who said this, and why? "I'm coming to realize EVERYONE can eat me."

Tuesday, February 2, 2016

Move Over, Lewis Carroll


Or, fun with new words that are actually just words I didn’t know and now I do and I didn’t make them up. 

Recently I peeked into my “Vocabulary” folder where for more than thirty years I’ve been stashing post-its and paper scraps with words I’d read and needed to look up in the dictionary (or the twenty online dictionaries and my hardcover, teensy-print-size, two-tome Oxford English Dictionary that could kill me during an earthquake). Confess! Some of you maintain files like this, too, and amass freaky lists of weird words that you vow to use in every single one of your novels. Or at least work into conversations.

Glancing over my list, I realize that I have an obsession with Brit lit and the funky words those authors love to use. And not just Terry Pratchett and Diana Wynne Jones—I swear that I read other British authors, too. 

After updating my list of vocabulary (there were only three words that I couldn’t find and suspect my authors were Lewis Carrolling their readers), I wrote two sentences with some of them. This is the joy of words, and these are all real words that some (or most) of you probably already know. Here are my frabjous sentences:

1. After the brangling stramash ended, the yattering, blethering roisterers wambled, then jinked with brattling, ruckling glucks through a pelter of rain into the frowsty, fusty fug of the niffy old mansion.

2. With wingeing girns, the stroppy, fubsy stripling flumped down, wuzzled my frowzled hair, grinned in a pawky, almost smickering manner, and said, “Gosh, you look goluptious today.”

Have fun with these words, provided you look up the ones you don’t know. ;) And for inspiration from one of the greatest poems ever written, check out video readings of Carroll’s Jabberwocky, which I memorized in high school. Didn’t we all?

FYI, I finished writing Chapter 4 of The Rogan Treasures, and intend to use all of the new words in the next chapter, uttering ruckling glucks while doing so.

Write on! (But watch out for falling OEDs.) :)