The Power of Language.

Do you have any favorites?

I do. I love it when I read the descriptive phrase - a gibbous moon. Love it! But what does it mean? What is a gibbous moon?

A gibbous moon occurs when the size of the illuminated portion of the moon is greater than half the moon but less than a full moon. I adore a gibbous moon. It’s more sensual than a full moon and more sexual than a sliver of a moon.

Lugubrious. Ever considered the word, lugubrious? To be lugubrious is to be gloomy, serious, sad, excessively sorrowful. What a wonderful, hefty word - lugubrious!

What about the words, sympathize and empathize? What’s the difference?

To sympathize is to feel compassion for the suffering of another human being, to empathize is to put yourself into the shoes of another human being. One can sympathize without sharing the experience. I believe empathy involves a sense of having a shared experience. Yes, to walk in another person’s shoes is definitely to empathize. If this was a Star Trek world, a Sympath would feel sorry for us, but an Empath would feel what we feel.

Cuckold is another word I love. Sounds like a bird because truth be told, it comes from the word cuckoo - a female cuckoo will lay her eggs in another bird’s nest. Somehow, in the Middle Ages, the word cuckold came to refer to a man married to an adulterous woman. Guess she was playing around in another man’s nest. And of course, the man being cuckolded was always the last to know.

I love the words narcissism and narcissist and narcissistic, despite my inability to remember how many s’s the words contain. A narcissist is an excessively self-centered or selfish person. The word is derived from the Greek myth of Narcissus, a handsome young man who rejected the attentions of the nymph, Echo. He was punished by falling in love with his own reflection which he spied in a pool of water. He fell so deeply in love with himself that he pined away, eventually withering into a flower, the narcissus.

Ooh, then there’s vagary or vagaries - the vagaries of fate - from the Latin, vagari, to wander. It means erratic and unpredictable. We are, each of us, subject to the vagaries of fate, as are our fictional characters at times.

Foist, feign and foible are three oldies but goodies. To foist something upon someone is to force something upon them, to pass something off as valuable, worthy. To feign is to pretend. A foible is an idiosyncrasy, a failing, a fault, a weakness.

I won’t foist an unworthy tale upon an unsuspecting reader, I hope. My heroines don’t feign weakness, unless they have a damn good reason. I wish I could say my characters had only one foible to be concerned about, but they tend to be idiosyncratic, another fine word.

One of my favorites? Providence. From Latin, providentia - divine guidance or oversight. One can only hope.

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