A Word Smorgasbord

I imagine that a passion for speed is the impetus for racecar drivers. Chefs delight in food. And don’t all writers love words?

Michael Berberich taught a class on personal essays that I attended -- a monthly workshop hosted by Bay Area Writers League. The class was thoroughly engaging and represents one of the best ten-dollar investments I think I’ve ever made. Because of my own word fetish, what most captured my attention was that Mr. Berberich shared an uncommon word with us -- he said it’s one of his three favorites. The word is ‘omphaloskepsis,’ and its charm is economy -- it says with fourteen letters what would otherwise require sixteen words to express. I can’t find the definition of the term in any of my dictionaries at home, but Mr. Berberich said its meaning is something like navel-gazing while sitting cross-legged and attempting to achieve a trance-like state.

After class, I asked Mr. Berberich what his two other favorite words are. He said they are, “’slob’ because of the definition of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary and ‘revision,’” which during the workshop he said is equivalent to the word ‘craftsmanship’ for writers.

I’ve never come up with a list of favorite words, but I think it’s because I’m fickle. I love so many of them, to choose the top three would be like choosing the most handsome in an army of Mel Gibsons.

My 2006 daily word calendar has been a great source of both pleasure and frustration for me. I’m learning a lot of interesting new words, but I can’t bring myself to throw away the pages. So far, I have approximately 150 of them making a mess of various drawers. Because those same words are neatly listed in my dictionaries, I’ve been telling myself it’s an irrational struggle and I should throw them away. Then today -- after a lot of delicious contemplation about word smorgasbords -- I realized that there was subconscious method to my madness.

In the way that other people dream of rolling in money, I’ve often thought that it would be thrilling to wallow in a heap of words. Even if I do act out that desire with my calendar pages, I doubt it will be as fun as when I find the perfect word to express something I’m writing about. That is an adroit pleasure, which I usually achieve with the use of a dictionary and thesaurus -- incidentally, never by omphaloskepsis.

(published July 2006)