harvesting words

set your timer: for the next 15 minutes, write about the words you love. Write about the words you hate. Write about words that make you think.

I'll be honest, there is a reason I skipped over this one 4 years ago when I had first started this project. While I love words, I'm not one who takes chances on using new or different words very often. On my iPad I have the Dictionary.com app that will send me a word of the day, every single day. Most days I'm curious enough to go and look it up to see what it means, but sometimes I just go about my day without needing to know. Yesterday's word was catawampus, which I thought was funny because I always just figured it was a word Toby made up. Although, he has always said kittywampus, maybe just the earlier version of the word?

I have found through writing various projects over the years that I tend to change the language or wording to fit the project. If I'm writing something for a young adult novel, the words I use will be different than those in an article for ten rules to happiness. I don't have a magic book that carries all my favorite words, but maybe I should. I will find the inspiration in a picture and create a whole post just from that. Perhaps I should try to do the same with the words I see. Perhaps... I do like that word.
A whole post on catawampus? Not so sure about that.

So, as Barbara has instructed, I will start to make a list of these words that intrigue me and make me want to learn more about them. I will star the ones I like, and the ones I don't like will stay in the dictionary forever.

For some crazy reason, when I started reading this chapter I was reminded of the movie Elf with Will Farrell. "Francisco...Fran-Sis-Co...Francisco... that's fun to say."

That is how my mind works. Welcome to my world.