When my sister and I were younger, we used to argue about who’d find the smartest-looking word to use in any random conversation. At school we had to take spelling bees and vocab’ lessons and later in high school came the time of “SAT words”: arduous whimsical words.

 
When I started blogging roughly a year ago, I thought I’d go the extra mile and try using some of those words I had learned: wallow, or perhaps snickersnee. I noticed that it got to be quite a lot of fun. Words are not inert - au contraire - they are quite alive. They evolve with our culture, change meaning, reach new heights, describe everything in this world - from objects you can buy on Ebay ( a new word aka neologism) to feelings.

 And a word isn’t just what it seems to be: it’s also a patchwork. Take neologism for instance. It’s derived from the French néologisme which in turn can be broken down into a prefix, a root, and a suffix: néo - log - isme. Isme is what makes the word substantive (being a noun). The prefix, néo, affects the meaning of the root: néo means new (as you can note, it’s not all that far-fetched) and lastly the root «log» means thought in Greek. New thought or new word…

 Quite often, each word comes with a fascinating history: what the old and dusty folks at university call etymology. A word nearly always has an explanation as to why it is the way it is. Passing from a language to another made it evolve until its present day shape. Take to be:

• Latin: esse, sum (I am)
• Italian: essere, sono
• French: être, je suis
• Spanish: ser, soy
• Portuguese: ser, sou

The links between all the infinitives (save French) are quite obivous but if they all stem from the latin verb, they have all evolved in slightly different ways.

The French verb is an exception - to make things spicier - as it is a combination of sto, stas, stare (to stand) and esse (to be).

 How does this dwindle down to the individual who writes a blog on the Internet? Because in a world where one wants to achieve fame & riches easily, he/she should know there is a treasure at hand: our language and that it is up to us to make our writings more enthralling so that readers become enthused.

 A great place to start is the Merriam Webster dictionary, the American reference. For French speakers, check out http://www.lexilogos.com/.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this small post about words and we’ll be definitely on the lookout for your trendy terms. Feel free to drop in your personal favorites as comments to this post!