D-eleterious

I can hear you now.  What?  Am I going to corrupt you?  Harm your psyche?  Is this what I think my books are?

No.  How about the word itself?  When was the last time you heard it in common conversation?  When was the last time you read it spoken?  Or, God forbid, have you only heard it spoken by Lina Lamont in Singing in the Rain?

Yeah.  That’s kind of my point.  The English language has so many amazing words, but how many of them do we ever use?  I mean, what was the point in us stealing words from Spanish, French, Italian, Latin, German, and dozens of other languages if we’re not going to bother using them?

Have you ever signed up for one of those “Word of the Day” email services?  Do you know what makes me really sad about those things?  With the first one I signed up for, maybe once or twice a month did I see a word that isn’t so common to me that I can’t figure out why it made the list.  I finally found one that had less common words, but still it’s rare that I see one I don’t know.  The last dozen I received were

• farcical  (I can’t remember the last time I’ve heard someone say this.  I see them talk about a farce, but farcical?  Nope.)
• singular  (really?  Singular is so uncommon that we have to put it on a vocabulary list?)
• sanguine  (With all the personality tests out there, huh?  Ok…)
• mendacious  (this was one I’ve never heard spoken.  I’ve only seen this in print.  I won’t be mendacious and pretend I use it daily.  😉
• salubrious  (Another one that I’ve only seen in print with the exception of an occasional legal commentator or something like that.)
• pejorative  (really?  REALLY?  With all the legal drama out there???)
• onerous  (Again, I hear it constantly.  Why is this on the list?)
• belabor  (Give. Me. A. Break.  I won’t belabor the point.  We need to get back to using the fascinating words we have in our dictionaries!

So, what Word of the Day websites do you like?  Do they come up with cool ones like my friend Darcie’s? She sent me an email a week or two ago to show that they’d actually used oppugn.  OPPUGN!  I’ve only ever heard my father say that word!  How did I never realize it would be spelled like its brother, impugn?  HERE‘s mine.

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