acquire the ovoids, there's a good chap

felinitykat was just asking on her journal about people's favourite words, and I realized that I have almost too many to list. I love words. I love finding exactly the right word to describe something, finding a word that's far too grand or far too humble, finding a word that I just want to roll around on my tongue, finding a word that makes me giggle.

However, I have been getting a certain degree of grief for this since, ooh, about the age of five (there were many schoolyard accusations of "swallowing the dictionary"), and I have friends who will still exasperatedly ask me why I couldn't just use a plain ordinary word instead of whatever Latinate jawbreaker I've just come out with. I try to explain that I'm not trying to be obscure or show off, it's just that that word is exactly right, and of course I could use a more ordinary word or phrase, in the same way that you could just wear plain clothes from Dunnes, or just play three-chord rock, but...

In fairness, I do play up to it occasionally, largely for my own amusement - I will confess, during a recent rehearsal at a point where Bandmate John needed to take up his little shaky egg things, to asking him to "acquire the ovoids" (as a result, there has been a mutter of "ATO" from the entire band at that point in the song ever since). Bad Lisa.

Also, I wonder have I got more wordy since I took up technical writing? My "work" writing is, unsurprisingly, extremely plain and simple - short sentences, simple constructions, not much in the way of baroque excrescences of vocabulary (sorry, couldn't help it). It has to come out somewhere...