Well, it is now 2013, which is great news really as 13 is my lucky number, so I'm expecting amazing things from this year.
My New Year's Eve was spent in the Wild West Erm... Country with Jenny M. I've known her for more than 20 years now and, as we've never spent a New Year's Eve together before, this year we decided to.
After an amazing Thai meal, we finally ended up, post midnight, in a cellar club dancing to bad music surrounded by terribly drunk men and creatively dressed women. There was enough synthetic material in the place that one spark and the whole club would have burst into flames.
Anyway, as I said, Jenny M and I have been mates for more than 20 years now and she knows me very well, which is why my Christmas present from her was bloody brilliant.
It's a desk calendar that has a new interesting word every day.
You see, Jenny M remembered me lamenting about my small vocabulary on various occasions so decided to help me out.
I have quite a few theories about why my vocabulary knowledge is so pitifully small and the main one is that I lost the bulk of my hearing in my teenage years, when your grown-up big vocabulary knowledge flourishes. That said, I could have added to it by reading lots and lots of books, but I was happier not doing that, and in addition to this, I actually became quite phobic of saying words I wasn't familiar with in case they came out wrong, so instead I stuck to the fail-safe vocab of my childhood. Indeed I lost count of the number of Alevel English essays I got back with the comment 'Use bigger, more varied and mature vocabulary please' accompanied by a nice shiny D grade.
In my 20s when I moved to London I decided I should really work on my word knowledge and started trying to learn and use big words. I read my thesaurus regularly, and I combed the archives of my mind for word replacements, with varying degrees of success.
I spent ages using the word peruse in the place of browse, only to discover it actually only applied to reading through something. I got profound and profuse muddled up and, as many of you will know I mispronounced Versailles, while I was actually in the bloomin' place. It took two weeks of solid practice to get that one right and even then I sound a bit Cockney when I say it so as a result tend to refer to it as that palace outside Paris.
So yesterday I opened my word of the day calendar with glee and to my absolute amazement in the opening section was an Abbreviated Pronunciation Key, telling me how I could work out the way to say a word. Amazing huh?
And my first word of the year was Retrodict, which means to utilise present information or ideas to explain (as a past event). Useful sentences with this in please peeps?
Today's word of the day is Legerdemain. This means sleight of hand or a display of skill. So does this mean I could say Deafinitely Girly used culinary legerdemain to conceal the fact she forgot to add enough eggs to her wedding cake, avoiding having to bake 120 cupcakes all over again?
And to all the brides I've baked for... JUST KIDDING!
Seriously though, I think this word of the day thing is gonna be great.
So get ready guys, DG's becoming a big wordsmith...
But for now I'm going work out how I am going to get legerdemain into my conversational day without looking like a total moron.
Happy New Year peeps!
DG
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