The 18th March Project – post 25

I took a break from writing for a couple of months because work got really intense and hectic, and I didn’t want to beat myself up about yet another thing I couldn’t achieve.

But now I’m back(ish), ready to start putting my heart back in my words and laying them bare on a sleeve… (This mixed metaphor is all awry.)

Awry is a funny word. When we were kids, my sister and I read it as aw-ree.

Tsk was tisk.

Epitome was epi-tohm.

There’s a right way to do some things, and some things you can muddle through because the end justifies the means.

But the things that have a right way- you need to be open to learning that way, and you can’t go on saying aw-ree, tisk, and epi-tohm.

And if you insist that your way is right, you end up looking like an uneducated fool.

It’s the same thing when you’re dealing with other people. If you insist that your history or your perspective or your aesthetic sense is “right”, without a care for other histories and other perspectives and other aesthetics, you risk alienating amazing people while looking like an uneducated fool.

Will everybody just take a breath and listen to other people instead of trying to justify themselves? Or worse, gaslighting?

Then we can figure out the right pronunciations, together.

Day 16 100words100days A short essay on etymology

150 words. I feel like a flowchart would have been a nice complement to this piece, showing how different roots can be combined to form different words. That’s the kind of thing I used to know once upon a Goan time…

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Etymology is a word about that denotes intense study of words. For much better definitions, please click here.

Words are like people: it’s nice to know where they come from, because knowing their origin can be a clue to understanding them. The same goes for their genetic make-up, the parts that mean one thing when put in a particular order can mean something quite different when rearranged.

Students attempting to grasp the basics of English, and even those whose knowledge extends far beyond the rudimentary, use these ‘parts’ or roots to figure out what a word means. Take the word philosophy. It has two roots, both Greek: philo, meaning love, and sophos, meaning wisdom. Knowing the roots isn’t always enough, as is evident from this example. Context is also important, and the way the word has changed with time (again, just as with people and the nature versus nurture argument).

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Day 17: Pick a proverb and write a pseudo-serious article