For the most part I’m not a fan of new words. I like the words we have and I always have to remind myself that we only have the words we have because at some point somebody made them up.
But every now and then a word comes along that I can embrace wholeheartedly. One of those words is “staycation” – a perfect way to say you are vacationing at home.
Today begins my first day of a nice, long staycation. Because I’ve been with my company for quite some time, I have a generous number of vacation days and also because of my workload, I don’t get to use too many of them for a chunk of the year. Now that my big program is out the door, I have to get cracking on these vacation days. This means a week plus off now, the rest of the Mondays in the summer off and then the entire of State Fair off.
This week though is strictly for hanging out and working on some of the stuff that hasn’t been getting done the last few months – cleaning, straightening, cleaning, yardwork, cleaning. Did I mention cleaning?
On Day One I’m going to make strawberry jam and make some basil-infused oil. I know that doesn’t sound like cleaning, but I do have a mammoth list and it has cleaning projects for every day as well as some of the more fun stuff.
What new word can you embrace?
I’m old fashioned. I don’t kiss on the first date and I don’t “embrace” new words. Most new words . . . I wouldn’t even hold hands with them.
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Ahhh, I’m such a fraud. Rita Hayworth . . . I would kiss on the first date.
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Aha!
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I’ve been putting Fred Astaire movies on our netflix list. Amelia loves the dancing even if she doesn’t pay much attention to the plot.
Royal Wedding was good. Top Hat is one of our favorites.
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I embrace the Canadian term for baby pacifier. The Canadians call them “soothers”, much better than Plug or Binkie.
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Working in technology, I have to embrace a lot of new words and most especially new meanings for words. The thing I work on, a “computer,” used to refer to a human being – now it’s a machine. A machine that can learn, after a fashion. Languages could mean spoken word or a particular way to use words as code to instruct the machine how to line up 1s and 0s to do a particular thing (like learn, allow us to blog, play games, look up a recipe, store information). Firewalls filter data and connections between machines, not actual fire (and can also get in the way). Lean and Agile don’t mean you have the prototypical gymnasts’ physique – it means you are working the way the cool kids do to make things. We now use Google as a verb as well as a company name…and that’s before I get to more esoteric stuff.
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I don’t imagine I am the first person to think of this, but I think I could embrace Trump-l’œil in place of Trompe-l’œil, which means “deceive the eye”.
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Making something that is two dimensional look three dimensional
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I have not heard that word before. Thanks!
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Good one!
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Speaking of jam; as I walked into Menards the other day, I saw a couple loading cases of canning jars into their van. The entire shopping cart was stacked full of jars; stacked taller than the sides of the cart. I commented that it was a lot of jars. She smiled and said it was a lot of “work”.
Good thing they did this on one of those 11% return days.
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Neuroplasticity. Not so much the word, but the concept. We were taught that nerves cannot heal, the brain does not change in certain ways. Now we know that is false. I never use the word but I am working on retraining my brain for pain issues.
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Amazon is charging me $14 to return the toner and I know it was their error. Guess I will shop local as I prefer and end up with a printer I don’t prefer.
Should be a word for this.
Or how about Target. Clerk mistakenly charged Sandy $270 too much. Full price was charged immediately. Refund took two days to appear. You do that a few thousand times a day . .
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Long time ago, before I met Kelly, Dad and I would take turns having a weekend off from milking cows.
One weekend I rented a hotel room in Rochester; couldn’t leave town as I had theater shows, but it was fun to spend the weekend at a hotel. That’s still a ‘stay-cation’ right? I recall they had theme rooms. Don’t remember the first night but there was a second night in a chicken themed room. And this was before i had my own chickens. Huh. Hadn’t remembered that until now. Foreshadowing!
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How about chocoholic…
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Trumpturds
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First day of stay-cation went well. 14+ jars of jam! But the strawberry huller turned out to be a bust. The old-fashioned way with a knife is still the way to go.
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A straw works great for hulling strawberries. It even sounds like what they are intended for.
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Oh, but cherry pitters are so much fun!
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For cherries, I mean. They would squish strawberries.
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OT – I had another run-in with bildungsroman today. Three times in a week and never before in nigh on to 70 years? Peculiar.
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I taught the term in AP English
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OT again – In a similar manner to rocks and eggs, if a shelf bracket breaks in a cabinet over a granite counter top, too bad, too bad for the dishes. The only plates that survived were in the dishwasher. We now have 4 dinner plates and 3 salad plates.
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Oh dear?
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The case for foam countertops.
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Did anyone even mention Friday thirteenth to you today?
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I only heard how frightened Schoenberg was of the number 13. He died on Friday, July 13 decades ago.
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We were both out separately and discussed how no one brought it up. Daily bits of culture fade away, not that it matters
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Mostly, I’m sticking with the old words. I don’t have a lot of brain cells I can spare to learn new ones.
I’m intrigued, though, with the term “crash blossom”, it’s a term that describes something that hasn’t had a word up till now.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/crash-blossom-words-were-watching
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Related: I keep chuckling as I find misplaced modifiers in what I’m reading… will post as OT next time I find a good one.
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