Dear Reader,
Kaput, jabberwocky, pugnacious, hunt-and-peck, chink, klutz, degust, and ubiquitous. For me, daily word-watching is akin to sitting on my back porch bird watching through my binoculars.
Ubiquitous. The first time I heard someone use the word, I was an adult in my 50's, in the midst of a phone conversation with one of Pfizer's marketing gurus. I was working on a project with Pfizer and when the man's voice on the other end of the line said, "I want this to be ubiquitous," I was clueless about what he meant. So rather than comment on the sentence he'd just delivered (with a word that was apparently "ubiquitous" to everyone but me), I did a slight little chuckle and tried to steer the conversation in a different direction. I'm usually pretty good at getting the meaning of a word from how it's used in a sentence, but this time I was at a total loss.
I'm a word catcher. I study new words, not to impress anyone, but because it's fun. Just the other day, when I was in the middle of a conversation (the topic providing me with the perfect opportunity to use one of my new words), I was ready and waiting to interject, and that's when my mind went blank. But I was determined. "Could we take a 5-minute break in this conversation? There's a word I read about the other day, and it's really applicable here, but I can't quite remember it...just give me a few minutes?
Degust. Now there's a tricky little word. You think you know what it would mean because it sounds like disgust. But it's a verb that means quite the opposite. Degust: taste (something) carefully to appreciate it fully. But then again, when you think about it, degust could turn into disgust, depending upon what you were tasting. "Dennis didn't drink it, he degusted it." And then after he really savored it, it disgusted him.
See, I told you, it's a tricky little word.
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
* Thanks to all the guest columnists who filled in for me last week while I was on vacation. And thanks to everyone who sent the authors welcoming emails, they really enjoyed hearing from you.
Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@DearReader.com
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