365 useless vocabulary words and a calendar

I should have been tipped off by the fact that it was one of the last calendars there and I paid about a fourth of the original price. No, I bought it anyway, thinking, “This is great, I love learning new words!” Now I have this word-a-day calendar, one of those rip-off paper blocks with a page for every day of the year.  Being the optimistic and naive person that I often am, I didn’t think it would contain an extensive collection of generally useless words.

So every day I rip off a page, and am surprised to find yet another word I didn’t know existed and will probably never be able to incorporate into a normal sentence. Maybe a zoologist would use it, but I would love to see an ordinary person find a way to fit “fissiped” into an everyday conversation. It isn’t often that it really becomes necessary to use an adjective that describes “having the toes being separated from one another, as in the feet of certain carnivorous mammals.”

My word for today is “plugola.” It means “Advertising or publicity that is intended for self-promotion and not paid for or underwritten by an independent sponsor.” Now I might actually be able to use this word if I were going into public relations, or were writing something about a publicity stunt. Obscure words are fun, but if you are going to go through the trouble to remember them, they should at least be mildly useful to you. Most of these words are industry specific, the kind that you would only know if you were a specialist in whatever field the word belongs, such as a zoologist or PR agent. Some of them are very out-of-date, and may only be found in old literature.

In addition to being mostly worthless, if people can actually manage to use a word like “fissiped” they just end up sounding conceited and arrogant. Enjoying unusual vocabulary words is an innocent enough pastime, but enjoying making people feel stupid through the use of bizarre terms is not quite so harmless. Now if they appreciate ostentatious words in their conversation or writing for the purpose of attempting to feel superior and sound more intelligent, I simply hope they acquire a good deal of pleasure from it. Congratulations to them, they have succeeded in entertaining themselves at the expense of being utterly incomprehensible. They have probably wasted a good deal of words communicating nothing to their unfortunate audience.

These kinds of words don’t seem to come up every day, and for me they only seem to come up on this ridiculous and slightly amusing calendar. Unless you specialize in animal foot conditions, you may only say “fissiped” once every five years. I can’t wait to be reading a book, and then realize, “Wow, I know that word, it was on that silly calendar.” I imagine one out of every hundred words in this calendar are useful to me within the realm of ordinary conversation, which means that this calendar has effectively expanded my vocabulary by… 3.65 new words in a whole year. Although if you really want to learn some impractical new words, I highly recommend it. After all, it is a rip-off.

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I’m not a writer

I have always resisted calling myself a writer. In the most basic sense, you could argue that a child with the ability to write his own name is a writer. I may be a writer by this standard, for I can certainly write my own name, but this is a bit too broad for my taste.

If one were particularly pretentious, he could insist that only those who write well are writers; by writing well, he would of course, imply those who write well by his own standards. There is this fuzzy line from those who cannot write, those who can write, and those who are writers. I can write, but that does not make me a writer. When I think of a writer I think of someone whose principal occupation is writing. By this criterion, I am not yet a writer, although I should hope that I could consider myself one someday. Dreams are not reality, but they can become it. For now, I am merely a student of writing.

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Let’s try this!

Alright, I’ll admit it. I’m horribly new to the blogging scene. I have little to no experience. But I can say this much, I’M GOING TO DO THIS. I try to get my fingers into a little of everything, and figure that I’ve got to get into this blogging thing. It’s media right? Well, that’s where I’m trying to get my two in the door, writing, news, journalism and the like. I have lots to learn, and “they” say that one of the best ways to learn is by doing. So here I am, writing a blog.

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