Once upon a time . . .

Once upon a time, I used a pencil to put words on a page with a rubber

eraser on the top of that pencil to correct mistakes or to change the wording.

I took a typing class in junior high school and was faster at producing words.  I also remember having to erase mistakes while hoping not to ruin the whole page and have to start over completely on that sheet of paper rolled into the clickety-clack old typewriter.  It was NOT electric.  It sometimes meant crumpling up the whole page and throwing it away whether I used pencil, pen, or typewriter.

Now I use a laptop to write, skipping all that mess.  With a laptop I edit before the words ever appear on paper.  Much more efficient.  Yes, articles I've written appeared in my local newspaper back in the last century.  I have also had things I've written published in Baby Talk magazine and other places.  What I write on this blog goes all over the world, but I don't blog to get paid.  I blog to share books with friends, most of whom I've never met, but have gotten to know over the years as we read each other's posts.  It is definitely a different world now than the one I was born into in 1940.  My Wednesday Word today is "change."

What motivates you today?

What motivated you to get up this morning, to get up and get going?

That M in my Monday Motivation illustration looks daunting, doesn't it?

Does reading the next chapter of your book make you want to get up, maybe to eat breakfast with a book in one hand?  Also, what are you reading?

An attitude of gratitude today

Since I've started doing the Action for Happiness prompts in this new year (see HERE), I looked to see what I should be doing today and it says I should write a list of things I feel grateful for and why.  So today I'll try to remember to think about gratitude and make a list.  For starters, I'm grateful that it has gotten warmer today and is much too warm for snow.  A cloudy day with sunshine.

• On Monday, I mused about "one more thing," HERE.
• Wednesday Words were the words of the year from Oxford, Dictionary.com, and Merriam-Webster, HERE.
• My Thursday Thoughts were about the New Year, HERE.
• Friday's Book Beginnings, HERE, was from Endangered Words.

is hosted by Deb at Readerbuzz.

Beginning ~ with the Preface

Beginning

The seed for this book was planted four years ago.  I was reading Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue and among its countless treasures I discovered a word (which you will learn in due course) whose unfashionably flaccid meaning quite transfixed me:  "a mild desire, a wish or urge too slight to lead to action."

Endangered Words: A Collection of Rare Gems for Word Lovers ~ by Simon Hertnon, 2009, vocabulary, 224 pages

When a word perfectly captures a human truth, humans respond to it in the same way that they respond to a beautiful melody.  They smile.  They nod their heads.  They tell others of their discovery.  So says Simon Hertnon in his introduction to Endangered Words.  He provides one hundred hand-selected rarities and breathes life into them with his lucid descriptions of their meaning and engaging examples of their usage.

Thanks to this book, you won't have to be at a loss for words or reach for the clichéd and commonplace.  The English language is brimming with alternatives, and this book offers the cream of the crop.  Filled with words to be treasured for their elegant precision, this is the perfect handbook for writers and an fun read for anyone with an appetite for the very brightest gems of the English language.

Gilion at Rose City Reader hosts

Book Beginnings on Fridays.

Doing Action for Happiness again ~ Happier January

Click to enlarge the calendar so you can see each day's idea.  Today's says, "Find three things to look forward to this year."  Okay, I'm thinking and putting them here for my Thursday Thoughts.  What do I look forward to?

    1.  I look forward to warm weather again.

    2.  I look forward to making new friends.

    3.  I look forward to making life better for someone.

Thoughts for the New Year

Well, this is the day I start reading a page a day of quotes selected by Andy Cohen that I told you about recently, HERE.  Glitter Every Day is filled with quotes that inspired the author.

On the very first day, he quotes his own mother!  I think she was probably happy her son actually paid attention to what she said, and now I wonder if my own children remember things I said to them when they were young.

Words of the year for 2025

Rage Bait (Oxford):  

Online material designed specifically to provoke anger and boost engagement.  Rage bait is online content — posts, articles, videos — intentionally designed to provoke anger, outrage, or strong negative emotions to boost engagement (such as likes, shares, comments) and drive traffic or revenue, leveraging algorithms that favor controversial content for profit.  Rage bait uses inflammatory language, false premises, or divisive topics to make users react, essentially "baiting" them into an argument or heated discussion for clicks and attention.  Oxford University Press named it their word of the year for 2025 because of its widespread impact on online discourse.  I like that this image from Merriam-Webster shows smiley faces which are NOT smiling.  :D

67 (Dictionary.com):  

Nonsensical slang from Gen Alpha, highlighting new communication patterns.  This image from the New Yorker shows two people who are writing those numbers over and over.  Pure nonsense, right?

Slop (Merriam-Webster):  

Digital content, often AI-generated, that is low-quality, misleading, or just plain bad (e.g., "AI slop").

  I already shared this definition, HERE, before I learned about the others.