New blog feature: Wordy Wednesday

I love looking up words and finding out what they mean. The more I've done it, the more I've found myself surprised. Words don't always mean what we think they do. Over time our language has changed:

• We've made up new words for things that didn't exist before.
• We've decided words mean things that they never meant before.
• We've shortened things to make them faster because we're all so darn busy or it costs too much to fully say what we mean.

In other words, language is alive. It evolves as we evolve. Some-times that's good, some-times that's bad. In some cases we've grown and expanded ourselves. In some cases we've forgotten things that we, as a species, knew before. We've become distracted. And in some cases, we've actually "dumbed" things down for ourselves, which has really backfired on us because now our language has become watered down. I hate it when all the ice cubes melt in my drink and it tastes less like it's supposed to and more like Yuck! In our culture, it's all catch phrases and commercials and who owns the rights to them.

It's not all about definitions though. The roots of words are as important as their own particular meaning. The word or words a word was based upon contain secret codes that ancient places in us understand. We can forget, but we can't disregard where a word came from and pretend it holds no importance anymore because it's old. Newer isn't always better.

Last year I found a Webster's 7th New Collegiate Dictionary from 1969 sitting outside my local library just waiting to be recycled. I scooped it up and took it home. It contains wonder for my brain and spiritual knowledge for my soul. In other words, I adore it! I recently bought a 1958 Britannica World Language Edition of Funk and Wagnalls Standard Dictionary, letters A - P, from a yard sale. I also use Webster's World Thesaurus and a copy of The Oxford American Desk Dictionary and Thesaurus.

At times, in order to fully understand a subject, I am lead to other books to research ideas and connections such as books about animals or the chakras, The Bible, etc. I go where I am lead and write down what I find in my journal. I call this studying and I credit this "studying" with much of what I understand and believe about Life. I hope to share that knowledge with you and that you may gain your own understandings and beliefs about Life or further root yourself in what you already know.

I don't usually allow comments (a personal preference), but I'd love to hear any thoughts you might have about the words, so I'll try to remember to allow comments on Wednesdays. If I forget and you'd really like to share something, please email me (amagickalmeliss AT yahoo DOT com).

Looking forward to seeing you every other Wednesday.

~magick~
Meliss