The KellyGram

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NEGATIVE OPPOSITES!

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In his excellent A.WORD.A.DAY ezine, Anu Garg chooses a different theme for each week's offerings. For the week of May 4-8, 2009, he featured the positive version of words which usually appear only in the negative. The words were: evitable, wieldy, exorable, gainly and corrigible. At week's end, he features reader responses to that week's words.

That week, the following response came from a reader named Sally Stretch. She wrote: "Many years ago I read a humorous article entitled 'The Mystery of the Vanished Positive' which questioned why the form of words like 'inane' 'unruly' and 'disgusting' appeared to be negative, but that there were no corresponding positive forms. Also why something can be described as 'spick and span' but never just 'spick' or 'span'! The article ended with a poem entitled "A Very Descript Man," parts of which have stuck in my mind over the years. This week's theme prompted me to look for it and read it again in its entirety."

She included a copy of the poem, cleverly written by J.H. Parker, which included many "negative opposites." You'll find the poem by clicking on the following link: A Very Descript Man

To subscribe to A.WORD.A.DAY, visit wordsmith.org.

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THE BOOK THAT CHANGED GARRISON KEILLOR'S LIFE

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Another of the word-oriented ezines I enjoy reading is Loren Ekroth's Better Conversations. In a recent issue (3/29/09), he included an article titled "The Book that Changed My Life," by Garrison Keillor. Keillor, of course, is best known as the host of the long-running radio program, "A Prairie Home Companion." The program features his monologue, "News from Lake Wobegon," a fictional small town, "where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average."

In the article, which appeared in the March issue of Best Life magazine, Keillor sings the praises of a book which made its first appearance in 1852, compiled by a British man named Peter Roget. Here's what Keillor wrote:

"The book was Roget's International Thesaurus. It not only changed my life, but also transformed, diversified, and modulated it by opening up the lavish treasure trove of English, enabling me to dip my pen into glittering pools of vernacular, idiom, lingo, jargon, argot, blather, colloquialisms, officialese, patois, and phraseology of all sorts. 

"I discovered Roget's as a callow youth grazing in the reference books. I opened it, and it became my guru, master, oracle, mahatma, rabbi, mentor, and also my bible, and I clung to it and consulted it constantly, feverishly, ever in search of the precise color and gradation of words.  Its effect on me was to transform me from a plain little nerd from Minnesota to a raconteur and swashbuckling boulevardier, sporting man, pilgrim, loafer, sometimes a roughneck, sometimes a fire-eating visionary.

"And today, thanks to the thesaurus, I am dapper, dashing but unaffected, light-footed, willowy, urbane, and rather resplendent in my raven tuxedo and alabaster shirt and ruby hosiery, and - need I mention it? - well-spoken. Women cluster around me in flocks, packs, sometimes herds, to hear me converse, shoot the breeze, speechify, soliloquize, and wax rhapsodic. 

"They purchase my writing, whether it be belles lettres, essays, rants, screeds, squibs, feuilletons, or mere scribbling, and thus I earn the cabbage, moolah, simoleons, shekels, mazuma, and green stuff I need to buy the baby a new pair of slippers, sneakers, loafers, flip-flops, or shoesies every so often. 

"Thank you, Peter Roget.  Gracias and merci."

High praise, indeed! If a recent edition of Roget's Thesaurus isn't in your library, I recommend you acquire it, and use it in your writing activities. I also recommend Keillor's daily ezine, The Writer's Almanac. For a free subscription, visit writersalmanac.publicradio.org.

Loren Ekroth also offers free subscriptions to Better Conversations. You may email him at loren@conversationmatters.com.

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SMILE AWHILE

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This month, we're featuring some of the humorous quotations from our collection, in the hope that they'll help you "Smile Awhile."

My therapist told me the way to achieve true inner peace is to finish what I start. So far I've finished two bags of M&Ms and a chocolate cake. I feel better already.
    Dave Barry

The guy who invented the first wheel was an idiot. The guy who invented the other three, he was the genius.
    Sid Caesar

Fortunately the wheel was invented before the car, otherwise the scraping noise would have been terrible.
    Laurence J. Peter

All my life I’ve been terrible at remembering people’s names. I once introduced a friend of mine as Martini. Her name was actually Olive.
    Tallulah Bankhead

If it weren’t for Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of television, we’d still be eating frozen radio dinners.
    Johnny Carson

I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?
    Jean Kerr

I have enough money to last me the rest of my life — unless I buy something.
    Jackie Mason

I wonder if other dogs think poodles are members of a weird religious cult.
    Rita Rudner

Red meat is not bad for you. Now, blue-green meat — that's bad for you!
    Tom Smothers

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ODDS AND ENDS

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FUN WITH WORDS

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Here are the answers to this month's puzzle:

1. Tucson
2. San Diego
3. Los Angeles
4. Salem
5. Denver
6. Las Vegas

(Source: More Joy of Lex, Gyles Brandeth)

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THE LAST WORD

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"By the streets of by and by, one arrives at the house of never."
(Miguel de Cervantes)

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© 2009 by Bob Kelly. All rights reserved.