The Floating Egg

I am think­ing today of sur­fac­tants. I don’t know why; I have no desire to reduce the sur­face ten­sion of any liq­uids. I have the vague notion that most sur­fac­tants are prob­a­bly unnat­ural addi­tives to laun­dry deter­gents and so are unde­sir­able. But it is so fun to say.

What is it about the word verve? It does absolutely noth­ing for me, and it really seems like it should do. I never use in writ­ing nor in speech; it never even occurs to me to do so. It is a char­ac­ter­ful, even eccen­tric word. It could even be quirky. It seems, on paper, to be …

We don’t talk about wrights much any­more, about mak­ers. Lam­p­wrights, wheel­wrights, and cer­tainly wain­wrights sel­dom appear in every­day con­ver­sa­tion. This may have some­thing to do with the absence of the activ­ity of mak­ing such things as lamps, wheels, and wag­gons. What hath your wright wrought for you? Archaisms are us.

Awoke in the wee hours with this float­ing in neon let­ters through my fore­mind. I don’t even know what it means. It is a music sub­genre of some sort, that much is clear, but I would be help­less if pressed to give even one exam­ple thereof.

While wash­ing dishes after sup­per tonight I was try­ing to think of a high-falutin’ word that means ‘after sup­per’. The best my school­boy Latin could do was the rather plod­ding post cenam. Then the above word popped into my head. I could not for the life of me come up with the slight­est idea what …

One of the things I love about our home is that my wife keeps an unabridged dic­tio­nary open on a stand in our liv­ing room. When­ever she looks up a word which she comes upon in her vora­cious read­ing, she makes a lit­tle pen­cil tic next to the entry. I have no such habit, but …