Delightful Diction

Wordsmith Willie William Shakespeare is credited with inventing over 400 words - including bedroom, chopped, courtship, lackluster, shudder and unreal. -- sparknotes.com

You read it first in this week’s The Factory in Guide magazine.

Words! Words can be really fun! Apparently William Shakespeare thought so, too, as he used a lot of them in his poems and plays. And, when there wasn't one that really worked for him, he created new ones. In fact, new words are being created everyday. If you ever play the game Scrabble, and use the dictionary that goes with the game, you can see how often new words are added every year and how often the game's dictionary is updated. According to one estimate, a new word is created every 98 minutes (approximately 14.7 new words per day) and hundreds of words are added to English dictionaries each year.

Do you have any favorite words? Some are just fun to say, and even more fun to spell. The word plethora, for example, means overabundance. There are a plethora of words in the dictionary. Or superfluity, also means overabundance or in excess. Then there are the words shenanigans, brouhaha, monkeyshine and tomfoolery. These words all mean trouble or funny business. They definitely give you the feeling that mischief is right around the corner!

If you like to write poetry, words are very important. Sometimes a poem just isn't complete unless it has just the right words here and there, in order to carry just the right meaning. In Shakespeare's day, which was from 1564 - 1616, often the words that he created were single words that he brought together to create a word with a different flavor or meaning, like bedroom or lackluster. Or, he would take a noun and use it as an adjective. I wonder how he would feel about the word "mindblower" today? Or the adjective mind-blowing? I think he would like those.

There is a game that my friends used to play. One person would choose a word from the dictionary, and everyone playing had to write a definition for it. The person that chose the word would also write the actual meaning and then collect all the other people's definitions. All the definitions would be read and people had to guess which was the correct meaning. The person to guess five correct definitions first was the winner. Some of the definitions people write can be really funny. It is a very entertaining game. But it is also a learning game, too, as we learned about many words we had never known before. And it definitely came in handy when playing Scrabble!

The books of Psalms and Proverbs in the Bible quite often read like poetry. They can be very uplifting and meaningful, as well. There are many promises of reassurance for us in these books, to increase our faith. Why not try reading some today?! And you might just find a word or two that you never knew before!

Scripture taken from the New King James Version, Copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.