Tag: word of the day

Argle-Bargle (AKA Tuesday’s Tidbits)

+ My Word-of-the-Day daily email taught me “argle-bargle”, today. This is what the meaning is of argle-bargle: “Copious but meaningless talk or writing; nonsense.” It’s a great word. I’ve honestly never seen the word, “argle-bargle”, nor heard the word, “argle-bargle” other than today (honestly, sometimes the Word-of-the-Day tends to get a little “out there” and obscure when it comes to their word choices, in my opinion, but I’m hooked. I read the words daily and I even sometimes try to incorporate some of these words into my own argle-bargle, as I am doing so today.) Admit it. Argle-bargle is a fun word. Try saying it three times fast: Argle-bargle. Argle-bargle. Argle-bargle.

+ The best quote I have read this week (and you know that I love me some great quotes) is this one: “The future has an ancient heart.” – Carlo Levi (Incidentally one of my most kind and loyal, longtime readers, Gail, recommended a book in my Comments recently, and I immediately downloaded it. It is an excellent book and this is where I read the quote. The book is called Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed, who also wrote Wild, which was made into a movie starring Reese Witherspoon) Anyway, “The future has an ancient heart” speaks to me. It is so true and so comforting. It suggests that whatever we are meant to do, and to learn, and to become, is already imprinted in our most primal, wisest DNA. It will find its way out, through many channels, in our lifetimes, individually and collectively. If you ever need to just “let go”, use this quote as your mantra. It’s now going to become one of my own regular mantras. Thank you, Gail, for your most excellent recommendation. This line from the book, alone, is life-changing.

+ I had an experience over the weekend that I’m sure could have probably made a viral Tik-Tok (although I’m honestly not a Tik-Tok fan, so I don’t really know. I’ve always preferred words over video.) We were visiting our son in a major city in our country, and while he was doing his schoolwork, my husband and I visited a swanky section of town for some lunch and some shopping. I found a delightful boutique full of unusual artsy stuff (my favorite kind of shopping) and I decided to purchase a bracelet in the shop. My husband was doing his own thing outside (small artsy boutiques are not his favorite kind of shopping. I’m not sure that my husband actually has a favorite kind of shopping.) The cashier was perhaps a few years older than me (probably in her late 50s) and she mentioned that this boutique was not actually her store, but it was her daughter’s store, and she was just trying to help her daughter out for the afternoon. What ensued next became two technologically challenged middle-aged women trying to figure out how to pay for my item, with the daughter on a Facetime call, trying to guide us through the whole process (“I think that we press this button” . . . “No! No! No! Don’t press that button!” . . . .”The green one!! Green!!”) and then for the cherry on top, add-in the shop-owner’s father, also a technologically challenged middle-ager, who did not have his readers on, and thus promptly pressed a “7” instead of a “1” which almost made me pay seven times what I was supposed to pay, if we hadn’t been saved by hearing his daughter screaming through the phone: “Abort! Cancel the transaction! RED button! RED!!” In the end we got “the system” to work correctly, and I paid the fair price for my lovely bracelet. And the whole time I was thinking, if my kids had been in the shop and had gotten this on video, I might be Tik-Tok famous right now.

+Congratulations, you made it to the end of today’s argle-bargle.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Ambedo

Word for the day: Ambedo The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows describes ambedo as this: n. a kind of melancholic trance in which you become completely absorbed in vivid sensory details—raindrops skittering down a window, tall trees leaning in the wind, clouds of cream swirling in your coffee—which leads to a dawning awareness of the haunting fragility of life . . . .

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows was created to find words for emotions which we feel, that do not quite have a word for that particular, intricate feeling in traditional dictionaries of our modern languages. On another site the word ambedo is found beside the heading of “Thoroughly Depressing Word of the Day.” On this site (BK Words Worth Knowing), it says that ambedo is this: “briefly soaking in the experience of being alive, an act that is done purely for its own sake.”

I am not sure why ambedo and its meaning is considered to be “thoroughly depressing.” I am not quite sure why a word, that seems to me, to mean mindfulness which is also filled with deep emotion and appreciation, comes off as depressing. I find it more depressing how mindlessly and unmoved we seem to go through our lives a lot of the time. We get into habitual robotic action, often forgetting what we last did. We drive along in beautiful scenes full of nature and notice that everyone in these scenes are hunched over their phones, oblivious to the miraculous vitality teeming all around them. We stay in the dramatic, antagonizing stories created in our heads, while we miss the epic novels of being present in our every living moments, while being willing to fully feel the emotions and sensations which this presence brings to us.

Readers, let’s take some time today with ambedo. Let’s light a candle and stare at the flickering flame. Let’s watch water trickle into a fountain, and hear its light touch as it falls to the pool of water calmly catching it below. Let’s watch a precious pet napping in the sunshine and notice how the sunlight highlights the intricacies of fur and patterns of the fur slowly rising and falling to the vital breathing of our beloved companion. Perhaps what we really feel when we allow ourselves some rare ambedo moments, is an overwhelming, lump-in-the-throat awe of the incredible miracle of life. Perhaps the depression only comes about as an after-effect of ambedo, because we realize how little of our own lives we spend in the pure astonishment of the amazing, yet fleeting experience of it all. We worry about being in ambedo states as “wasting time”, and yet what ambedo does for us, is makes us come to the realization of how we waste so much of our living experience ignoring the true experience of real, tactile, beautiful, in-the-moment sensory life.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Lucky Find

I get a “word of the day” emailed to me every day. This week, I liked one “word of the day” so much, I put it in my journal. I like this word so much, that I am blogging about it this morning. The word is French. The word is “trouvaille”. It means “lucky find”. How fitting that this new word in my vocabulary is a lucky find for me! As I write this, Ralphie, our big ol’ goofy Labrador retriever is playing the piano. He recently discovered that he can play the piano by pushing the keys with his chin. His musical talents are a lucky find for him. (whether his new found talent turns out to be a lucky thing for us, remains to be seen – thank goodness for piano key covers) What are some of your “lucky finds” in your life? I consider my husband, and my friends, and my dogs, to be my best “lucky finds”. I have a pewter bunny bank full of lucky pennies, found as I go about my daily business. One time I found several beautiful Hermes scarves at a thrift shop, for the whopping cost of five dollars each. There are so many books that I have read over the years that turned out to be “the right book, at the right time.” They were trouvailles, for sure. Our lives are full of trouvailles, if we are willing to look for them and recognize them for what they are, and what they mean to us. I am wishing for all us, many trouvailles in the new year and beyond. Let’s focus on our trouvailles, versus our troubles.

“We are all a great deal luckier that we realize, we usually get what we want – or near enough.”– Roald Dahl

“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”– Cormac McCarthy

So Much Sense

Image result for funny tortoise pictures

I learned a new word this morning. I get a daily email from word genius and like an annoying, smug, little know-it-all kid in your honors English class, often I look at the “word of the day”, that comes on this email and I say to myself, “Oh, phhhh, I already know that word.” Well, lah-ti-f-ing-dah! (that one is not actually a real word. It’s not likely to be featured on word genius any time in the near future.)

Today’s word is a lovely word. I absolutely plan to add it to my vernacular. Today’s word is Senescence, pronounced Sa-ness-scents. It means “the aging process.” Now if you are thinking, “Oh, phhhh, I already know that word,” to you I say, “Well, Lah-ti-f-ing-dah!” I personally don’t recall ever hearing the word, senescence, and I think it sounds a hell of a lot better than the totally annoying, abrasive, constantly overused word “aging”, that seems to be coming at me at all angles, these days. Doesn’t Senescence Home sound like somewhere you’d actually want to got to, versus “Old Age Home”? Even “Anti-Senescence Cream” makes me want to put the cream back on the shelf, saying to myself, “Maybe I actually want some senescence. It sounds mysterious, sensual and sophisticated.”

Us second half adulters have earned our senescence, which to me, seems to really mean “the essence of sense.” We have so much sense now that we have matured, that we have lengthened the word “sense”, to “senescence”. I’m proud of my hard-earned senescence.

word genius likes to give you fun little facts about the “word of the day”. Today we read that tortoises have what is called negligible senescence, meaning that with proper care and exercise, tortoises can live indefinitely. I think that I might come out with a whole new skin care line. (because we don’t have enough of these products, right Ulta? Ha!) I will call it “Tortoiseshell Luxury Shield Cream – for elegant people who only want to experience negligible senescence.” Anyone offering seed money for this promising enterprise?!?