What, Exactly, Do You Mean?

An old business partner of mine with a limited vocabulary just made up words willy-nilly to fill her sentences. Sometimes they were quite convincing, like when she said her daughter went to Boston Universary, it took me a while to realize that universary is not a word. Could be, but is not. But when she crowed that her aging mother had been appointed the head of battlement at her temple, I was stymied. I never knew what she meant with that one, but I doubted it was "a low wall on a tower with spaces for shooting." She did this so often that I finally had to end our association; it was either that or shoot myself.

I recently bought a dictionary to keep in the bathroom because, let's face it, sometimes I read in there. What I like to do with my bathroom dictionary is open it to a random page and see how many words I already know, don't know, never heard of, or fit me perfectly. Today I hit the jackpot on the page with the word personify at the top and--coincidentally-- found the following words that I feel anyone would agree do personify me: I can be perspicacious. Actually, let me amend that statement and say that perspicacity is my number one outstanding quality. I am also persuasive, perverse and often pesky, and have been know to pester. I am certainly pessimistic on occasion, at times petty, and nothing if not petulant.

Those are all words I already vaguely knew, although not 100%. But it's interesting to come upon words, at this late date, that I don't know at all, like dray, garnishee, virgule, seraph, traduce and halcyon. It certainly puts things in perspective.