Oh My Word!

By: Beatrice Iceman

Any of you who have read my writing in The Current know how much I treasure words. Their fascinating history goes back a long way, maybe even as far as 200,000 years ago. Some words in English that we still use are 10,000 years old --- TEN THOUSAND. That's 500 generations of people speaking some of the same words that you say every day. 

According to Science Magazine, the average 20-year-old American knows about 42,000 words. People learn "new" ones every few days. To save you the trouble of finding these yourselves, here are a few interesting words. 

Let's start with an easy one: CURRENT. This word comes from the Latin verb "currere." -- "to flow with life." Easy enough, but here are some you may never have heard of, and they are terrific.

SPUDDLE: A blend of "spud" and "puddle," it goes back to 1630 when English poet John Taylor used it to describe a person who seems busy but doesn’t accomplish anything. Sort of a wet couch potato.

LIBROCUBICULARIST: A person who reads in bed. 

GRIMALKIN: An old female cat. 

CHIONOPHILE: A person who likes snow. 

PSITHURISM: The sound of wind blowing through trees and rustling their leaves. 

PERENDINATE: To put off a task until the day after tomorrow. 

PETRICHOR: The smell of earth after rain. 

RAWGABBIT: A person who talks at length about something they know absolutely nothing about. 

By the way, what are those 10,000-year-old words in the English language that we still speak today? The University of Reading in the U.K. used an IBM supercomputer to track ancient words. These are some of the oldest they found: "I," "THREE," "GIVE," and "MOTHER." And that's the truth. I'm not a rawgabbit!

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Beatrice Iceman is a life-long writer, editor, and teacher of writing on both the corporate and university levels. She has enjoyed the beauty, culture, and history of life at Smith Mountain Lake for 20 years.