December Daily: favorite words

jjhunter, "What are five words you like or find especially meaningful + 1 word you despise? Why?"

1. Just tonight I was talking to the spouse about how much I like the word 'vile.' It's so exaggerated that it can pretty much always bring out the humor in a situation to me -- if my ex-boss was awful, I can just go on complaining, but if she was vile, I have to laugh. (The context of this conversation was the spouse having heard a radio interview with the songwriter who wrote "Poke Sallet Annie," which I remembered as having a line that went "a vile, mean, straight-razor-totin' woman," but the official lyrics tell me that there was no such line, and also that it's actually "Poke Salad," which is just wrong.)

2. I'm very fond of using 'focus' in a metaphorical way for what you do when you edit a sentence, or do anything else that brings a thing closer to fully expressing what you want it to express. I once had a boss who used 'hone' that way -- it's interesting that her metaphor was kinetic and mine is visual.

3 and 4. Anyone who talks to me for any length of time will tell you how much I overuse 'evidently' and 'actually.'

5. The verb 'wrap' isn't particularly lovely when said out loud, but for some reason I associate it with love and comfort so strongly that its connotation is almost religious to me (except that I use it a lot in sex scenes, too, so it can't be too religious).


And I work in a giant corporation, so at the moment the word I especially despise is 'ask' as a noun. Like: "I know it's a big ask, but this is important." Was there a problem with the word 'request'?




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A proposal

Away with the idea that everyone, by nature, is either a top or a bottom.

Let's have more of the idea that everyone, by nature, is either a big spoon or a little spoon.