Poetry Friday WORD for tomorrow, and damn, but how I loves words

Patches and Meno have been discussing what all cat owners are familiar with and dread with a twisted form of amusement…taking your cat to the vet. We ourselves have devised a sly system for our own feline, wherein there is much petting and cooing of the kitty, then a frantic shove in the carrier (which we stealthily extract from piles of crap in the basement). As my husband’s schedule allows him to be the lucky ‘shover’, he always gets me in on the action by calling me at work as he drives Mad Kitty to the vet, and putting his cell phone next to the carrier, so I can hear the frantic “meow…mrow…MEOW…MRRROW!!” for myself. I save these phone messages. They make me laugh.

Sorry, kitty.

The Poetry Friday WORD for tomorrow is CAT. Or KITTY. Or, hell, even PUSSY. Whatever word you choose to describe the feline persuasion (and they are persuasive, aren’t they? “Pet me.” “Feed me.” “Leave me the hell alone.”) Feel free to use any, all or other words like that there in your blog post tomorrow, in whatever catnippy form makes you writhe on the floor with supreme joy…poem, drawing, story, salmon sculpture, phone message, naptime dream where you fight with dogs….


I leapfrogged from blog to blog to blog this morning and whilst reading a post, I stumbled upon a delicious word. A word I cannot use in everyday settings because I would be stared at, and not for my yummy cleavage. A word my friend J would not even be able to hear, as he cannot understand words of more than 2 syllables. The word? “Pluperfect.” So awesome…pluperfect…pluperfect…. It’s not the first time I’ve read the word, but it’s the first time I stopped to look it up to make sure I understood it. Y’know how you can infer the meaning of a word by the content surrounding it? I knew what ‘pluperfect’ meant, but I had to look it up, to definitely cement it in my head, much like I did the phrase “ne plus ultra”, which I also cannot say in everyday conversation, but which I will someday use in a blog post, and feel all smug about until one of you uses a cooler phrase in your post that knocks my knickers off and which I adopt as my own.

I remember as a kid, some school mates of mine saying when they came across a word they didn’t know, they wouldn’t look it up for fear of looking stupid. Stupid? Seriously? I look words up all the time…I love the etymology of words, how they came to be, country of origin, variations of spelling and pronunciation, meanings and gentle twists. I can also keep up with what the kids are doing nowadays with an Urban Slang dictionary I found. I find myself more and more twisting words around in sentences, warming words up in my hands and rubbing them liberally on emails and documents, seeing if they stick. I use bad grammar on purpose, for effect. Sort of like my old art teacher, who said a great artist is someone who knows all the techniques, and then does them wrong to make a point. Me and the dictionary, yeah, man, we’re totally making a baby right now. It’s pluperfect.

Have YOU learned any new words lately?