4 August 2008
I was visiting Jientje today and came across this Fun Monday meme. She inspired me to visit some of the other players which in turn inspired me to play along. 
So here is your Fun Monday Topic: Wordly Wise
Words are our building blocks, our stepping stones, and, for many of us, our salvation. We string them together so quickly at times, we often lose sight of how precious they are. So tell us about your favorite word… or if you can’t pick just one, tell us about a few. Are there certain words that feel good the way they roll of your tongue? Do some words make you feel smart? Or silly? Or happy? Which words do you find yourself selecting to put in your posts?
My two favorite words are facetious and kibitzing. I like the way the sound and appreciate their meanings. They are words that were often heard in my home as I was growing up. I assumed everyone knew them. I was wrong. As a teenager I once asked a young man if he was going to stand around kibitzing all day. He got a funny look on his face, turned to my sister and asked, “Did she swear?”
I have two pet peeves with word mis-pronunciation: Jewelry and Nuclear. Each is pronounced as it is spelled. Thus jewelry is jew-el-ree, not. There are others, but these two seem to come up frequently and affect me much the same way as fingernails on a blackboard. jew-ler-ree. And nuclear is new-clee-er, not new-cu-ler. 
I was looking for inspiration for a post this morning by visiting my blogroll. When I visited Pensieve I found Fun Monday. Sounds like a good post - Fun, even. (Get it? Fun?) Okay, it’s early yet.
A personal quirk? Now if I had any quirks this would be easier. I suppose my quirkiest quirk is the tendency to think I am practically perfect in every way. (Just call me Mary Poppins.) In my heart of hearts, I know that I am far from perfect, but something inside me tells me that I am or could be. I could solve the worlds problems if only the world would listen to me. If I had the physical stamina, I could create beautiful quilts, wonderful clothing, the most delicious meals.
As a child and a teen-ager my parents instilled in me that I am as good as anybody, and better than some, that I could be anything I wanted to be, do anything I wanted to do as long as I was willing to do the work required. To this day, if I want to do something I haven’t done before, I get a book and read up on it and proceed to do whatever. I taught myself to do counted cross-stitch and needlepoint in this way. I learned that I really didn’t enjoy tatting enough to want to learn that well. I have done home repairs and simple building projects because I had the basic knowledge and the audacity to believe that I could.
Does that kind of confidence, arrogance even, constitute a quirk? If so, that is my quirk. I totally believe I can do anything if I really want to do it. Those things that I have not done, I am convinced, are things that I really don’t want to do.
Lisa’s Chaos is our host for this Quirky Fun Monday. Stop in to visit her and the other quirks who have added their names to the list.
