Blame my hiatus on Superman. “If you are writing a blog, you are accomplishing something,” he noted. To prove I was accomplishing nothing and doing it well, I stopped writing my blog.

My writing didn’t cease though. One can still accomplish nothing well spending hours playing with words – shifting locations, inserting clarification, deleting, rewriting and changing subtle meaning with a synonym.

Finding the perfect word is by far my favorite game these days. Getting lost in my mother’s old thesaurus and dictionary, it’s hours before I find myself back on the page. Francis Andrew March’s definitions are pure precision. He spent his lifetime studying the discriminating use of the English language.  I can only imagine, if he were still alive, his vehement hatred of the standard usage of acronyms, emoticons and profanity. Personally, I attribute the demise of language the fact that March’s Thesaurus and Dictionary has been out of print since 1980, and digital media is destroying our ability to communicate effectively. Unfortunately, I am as guilty as my contemporary peers.

The precision of language is almost magical. Take some possible nouns describing an impolite person, say someone who discourages you from writing a blog. Today any one of the following might leap off the tongue: asshole, bastard, fucker, motherfucker, cocksucker, dickhead, shit, prick, son of a bitch or ass. There are other iterations of crudeness, but surely you get the point.

March presents us with a whole host of words to accurately describe impolite people. Most are still nouns co-opted from other nouns, but somehow they seem more dignified and precise. There’s a bear, which is someone ill mannered or morose. A beast is brutal or rude, but a brute is brutal and coarse. Aren’t rude and coarse synonyms? True, but rude is ignorant or impolite.  Coarse is indelicate, crude or vulgar. The more I delve the more enthralled I am. A blackguard can only be a man. A frump is an old, ill-tempered woman. Cullion is a mean-spirited and cowardly bad man, while a caitiff is just cowardly. There are derogatory references from before our pets became the center of our lives: dog, cur, mongrel, Hellhound and Hellcat. And if you really want to charge a bad man of being of the lowest order, call him a hangman.

Then there is the lost gem. An expression fallen out of use long since March died in 1911 but so brilliant I hope to incorporate into my repartee. An ill-mannered person is an “unlicked cub.” I told Superman the definition and my intent to include this expression in my vocabulary. He replied, “No one will know what you are talking about.” To which I replied, “You will.”

Disclaimer: Not every word used in this entry was checked for proper usage as defined by March’s Thesaurus and Dictionary.