Word

“Be careful what you say—you may have to eat your words.”

I don’t think so much about eating my words as about wearing them. When someone sees me, the words come back to haunt like a miasma around me. No matter how colourful my dress, bad words turn everything grey and muddy brown.

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Once a word has been allowed to escape, it cannot be recalled.

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 – Horace (65-8 B.C.)
 – Epistles, bk. I, epistle xviii, l. 71

My favourite word in the English language is »language«. However, if you gave me a slightly larger set of words to choose from I might have more difficulty expressing a preference.

The >>Word of the Day<< today over at dictionary.com is >>oblation<<.

>>Oblation<< comes from the past participle form of the Latin verb* >>offerre<< meaning >>to bring<<.

So, an oblation is an offering or a gift.

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* A Latin verb is traditionally cited by giving four forms, in this case: offero, offerre, obtuli, oblatum.

I think that Word is one of these strange softwares that can do anything except what you think it can do. It's not possible to write with this thing, but you can spend your day goofing with toolbars or including all types of spreadsheets or multimedia or even use it as the worst HTML-Editor ever.

I prefer ASCII, really.

Have you ever noticed that the only difference between »word« and »weird« are the vowels?

Rotor is a fine palindrome, thought Frank Leigh Dearie as he ambled down the Lost Highway.

I bought one of those Word-A-Day calendars to improve my vocabulary for college.

reify – to regard or treat (an abstraction) as if it had concrete or material existence.

LI

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

--The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
(trans. Edward Fitzgerald, 1st ed.)

And then some more words come along and a paragraph is born.

Words are the best toys you can give your brain.

A word has the power to define, to bind, to create, to destroy. Truely, a poet has power undreamt of by kings.

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There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.


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 – Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
 – The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain [1952], st. I

Without another word spoken on either side, the lodger took from his great trunk, a kind of temple, shining as of polished silver, and placed it carefully on the table.