I Admit It - I'm a Word Geek

I love words. I love finding out the story behind them. When I was little I puzzled out the word "remember". You see, when you know something, it is a member of the stuff in your head. When you forget it, it's not. Then, when it is a member again, you "remember" it. Pretty clever, huh.

I actually have no idea how the word remember came about, but that explanation worked for me when I was in elementary school.

In high school I wrote a paper on Orthography: The study of spelling. Yeah, total word geek.

In college I took a course on linguistics. The course didn't live up to my expectations - but then I had pretty high expectations. I was probably the only one there excited about the topic - the professor didn't seem to be.

But that didn't lessen my joy in words.

I love knowing that people used to say housen and eyen. Now very few words use "en" to denote plural. Two that do are children and oxen.

I love that the word maroon, meaning the color and the word maroon meaning to abandon someone came from the same root word, took wildly different paths and ended up in the language with two very different meanings for the same word.

So, it's not surprising, given my love of words, that I love to write. I get to take those words, some of which have fascinating histories, and use them in works of my own imagining. In my own way, I'm adding to the history of the words.

And I love it.

Yeah, I know. I'm a word geek. I admit it.