One of the first words I learned as young piano student was FORTE. FORTE is an Italian word (pronounced fore- tay) and it means loud. I loved seeing that little word FORTE printed on my music. Kick it in! Pound that keyboard! Permission to be loud? WooHoo! I soon began mimicing the adults in my life by using FORTE in…
Wild Word Friday! I’d never heard of the word CHOUSE (rhymes with house) until a month ago when I was browsing through a dictionary, and there it was, important enough to be tucked in its own little dictionary niche. Thus I learned that a CHOUSE is a swindler. Used as a verb, to CHOUSE means to trick…
Wild Word Friday! Don’t you just love a word like CHICANERY? Just saying it out loud engenders all kinds of mischievious images. Most of the CHICANERY in mylife happened when I was a kid. My younger brother Bob was my sidekick. Actually, I was probably his sidekick. He was a lot better at CHICANERY than I was, although…
Wild Word Friday! We couldn’t do a post last week about the word mother without including one this week about FATHER. My FATHER is a retired teacher and an active golfer. At age 84 he still regularly shoots in the low 40s and that’s after having back surgery last year. My FATHER always made life…
Wild Word Friday! My MOTHER is often on my mind right now. She is struggling with dementia, and, as always in matters of dementia, the whole family also struggles. My MOTHER played the piano beautifully and taught a more than a hundred students how to play. She was a church organist, a swing band pianist…
Wild Word Friday! HALL? Ummm, what’s wild about that? I’m not referring to HALL as in HALLway, but HALL as in the names of various German and Austrian places or towns such as HALLein, Schwaeblish HALL, and HALLstatt. You see, hal is the Celtic word for salt. During the HALLstatt Period (roughly around the 8th to…
Wild Word Friday! Last week 14-year-old Sukanya Roy won the 84th Scripps National Spelling Bee by spelling the word CYMOTRICHOUS. If you saw the video clip, you probably noticed that she had a little twinkle in her eye as she spelled the word, which I took to mean that she knew how to spell it…
Wild Word Friday! CIGARs are not in style. They are not healthy. They are not cool. They are not smart. (Can you can tell I’m highly opinionated about the subject?) My maternal grandfather (Granddaddy) was a smoker of CIGARs. I’m quite sure they shortened his life. (He died of a heart attack at age 69….
Wild Word Friday! I remember hearing as a child that the forbidden fruit eaten by Adam and Eve was an APPLE. Actually, I think my source for this misinformation was a coloring page for Sunday School of Adam and Eve strategically placed among leaves and bushes with APPLEs in their hands. I even remember contemplating that perhaps…
End of content
End of content
Get every new post delivered to your Inbox
Join other followers