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.
Perfectly curvaceous she clings to him. Pouty lips, come-hither stare, full ripe breasts, often blatantly bared for all to see. Sometimes she’s human, other times she is some mythical creature like a mermaid or genie. You know her from the pinup posters and girlie magazines. You question why she’s bound to this loser for life. As you look him up from head to toe, you realize she might be right there, but she’ll always be just an inked fantasy. He could never attract a girl like that. What girl would want a guy like him?
Accomplish Nothing Well 