Words

A short poem on language.

My guilty pleasure is collecting words. I collect short, clipped words like scif, grok, screed, and dearth. I collect throaty, violent words like guttural, groveling, gasping, and gaunt. I collect slithering, slippery words like punctilious, lugubrious, sanctimonious, and parsimonious. I collect rambling, esoteric words like anagnorisis, peripetia, and skeuomorphic. I collect bright, optimistic, and radiant words like scintillating, fecund, and diaphanous. I collect misunderstood and misused words like demimonde, parvenu, itinerant, and dilettante. I collect bubbly, bursting, broadly boasting words like bellicose, baroque, bourgeois, and banter.

I collect words that have no translation. Words that I’ve forgotten, because I never remembered to learn them. Words like ennui and sehnsucht. Like fernweh and ikigai. Tsundoku, boketto, hygge, and junto.

I collect words that describe the world much better than I can. And when I find myself at a loss for them, I smile, because I know there are more to find.

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