Logophilia

I love words. This prob­a­bly comes as no sur­prise, but I have tak­en delight in the scat­tered pieces of our lan­guage for as long as I can remem­ber. Long were the hours that I whiled away pag­ing through our two-vol­ume World Book Dic­tio­nary in my youth, and my vocab­u­lar­ies (use and recog­ni­tion) are unfor­giv­ably ampli­fied by this exer­cise. The words just fit togeth­er for me; far more eas­i­ly in writ­ing than in speech, but that is per­haps not all bad, either.

I have long want­ed to do some­thing with words in their own right. And so I intro­duce a new (and of course irreg­u­lar) series of offer­ings here at Albu­men. I am feel­ing unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly dis­in­clined to con­coct a cheesy title, so I will sim­ply offer from time to time (hope­ful­ly more or less fre­quent­ly) A Word. I am not a lin­guist, nor a mas­ter of ento­mo­log­i­cal nuance, so don’t expect gems of eru­di­tion. Nor will this be sim­ply a venue to flaunt my vocab­u­lary. These will sim­ply be my (seri­ous?) reflec­tions on words I find inter­est­ing. We shall see what comes of it.