"What is that you read, my Lord? Words, words, word. (Hamlet a2s2)

A word can hold so many pictures for the imagination.

I love reading books that use words so well that I can see a picture in my mind just from the descriptive words I read. A few months ago I signed up with the web-site, dictionary.com, to get a new “word a day” sent to me by email. I love learning new words, especially if they are interesting. I have started saving some of my favorite words, hopefully, for someday when I write a book and I can use them. Here are a few of the words that I have really liked:


Acedia: laziness or indifference in religious matters

Nitid: bright, lustrous

Kenspeckle: easily seen or recognized

And there are many more. However, one of my favorite words that I have learned is “evanescence” and it means; a gradual disappearance, or the state of becoming imperceptible. Isn’t that a beautiful word?

I can see using it in some type of fairy story, or a mystery maybe.

Another of my favorite words comes from one of my favorite Shakespeare plays.

In Henry V, act 4 scene 4, the King is praying the night before the battle of Agincourt with the French. In this prayer, he says this:

…But, like a lackey, from the rise to set

Sweats in the eye of Phoebus and all night

Sleeps in Elysium;…

It is the word “Elysium”. I wondered what it meant to “sleep in Elysium”. It sounds wonderful. Just from the context of the word, it sounds like a deep, peaceful, and restful sleep. So I looked it up and it means: A place or condition of ideal happiness. Now, knowing the definition, it makes being able to “sleep in Elysium” sound even more wonderful.

Even now, I find myself, after a rare night of solid sleep without my crazy dreams that I have regularly, waking up to the thought of this night I slept in Elysium. Doesn’t that sound so much more beautiful than to say you had a good night’s sleep?

So my challenge to all of you is to start using more frabjous words to describe our lives!