"WORDS FOR WORD LOVERS"

Yesterday was my 59th birthday. This picture is of me when I was a year or two younger, and not beating the freelance road to "wealth" (purchase of real hair conditioner) quite so hard. I picked up an interesting book at the local library sale today. Alas, not as interesting as its title, "100 Words Every Word Lover Should Know." (Published 2005, from the editors of the American Heritage Dictionaries.) It flipped open to internecine, a word I've never been sure enough of to actually use. I was looking forward to learning the other 99 words. (I outgrew the Reader's Digest vocab words ago.) So, based on that one word, internecine, I bought the book only to sadly discover that word lovers apparently don't know the following words. Do you know them all too? alchemy anachrosism (not kidding you) cappuccino chortle desultory detritus hiatus insouciant facetious fecundity egregious I need my money back don't I? Now I'm going to see how many I can find that are usable and I don't know them: didjeridoo--A musical instrument of the Aboriginal people (not too usable) Wait, I found one: litotes, "A figure of speech consisting of an understatement in which an affirmative is expressed by negating its opposite as in, "I showed him over the establishment, not omitting the pantry, with no little pride, and he commended it highly. (Dickens, "David Copperfield") Good Scrabble word perhaps. Another, nictitate (nik'titat) intransitive verb: To wink. Who's pretentious enough to use that one I wonder? Here's an unusual word I don't know: humuhumunukunukuapuaa. Hint: It's a noun. Of course you want to go out and use it right away but the problem is that this word for word lovers is either of two triggerfishes native to the outer reefs of Hawaii. Damn! And I was almost as happy seeing this word on the page as I was the day I discovered a word with a built in "ha ha": brouhaha. I expected way more from the editors of popular dictionaries, who, for all practical purposes, should have long lists of less common words for those seeking to enrich their vocabularies. Well, I just found the price of admission: sesquipedalian, adj., and I can honestly say I appreciate this word for "1. given to or characterized by the use of long words. 2. Polysyllabic. I can even imagine using it in places where I don't care if I'm pretentious as long as I impress; e.g. "I don't mean to be sesquipedalian, but have you ever seen a humuhumunukunukuapuaa?" If any of you have good 75 cent words that not everyone knows, and that can actually be used in conversation or writing, please add them to comments below. The winner of the best word or words can have the useless word book I bought today to give to someone in need, like a child.

OBAMA'S GOT IT! NO PROBLEM.

Didn't my man look cool last night at the debate just grinning at the lies and stupidities that came out of McNasty's mouth? No question that he won hands down. Now we just have to wait and see if the American people are smarter than a box of rocks, which they proved not to be during the last two elections. Fine opinion piece in The New York Times. today on the debate and on what a loser McCain is. Yeah, my man cool as a cuke got McNasty so rattled he didn't know his Freddie Mae's from his Fannie Macs and his Down's Sydrome's from his autism's. Towards the end of the debate he got all bug-eyed and started to look like the bug at the top of the page.

IF I DON'T MAKE SOME MONEY SOON I WANT TO KNOW WHY

Yes, folks, as you can see I broke down and got Google AdSense or whatever Blogger is calling their version of it. Forgive me. I have been too poor to buy peanut butter and jelly as well as bread to put it on. I just got desperate and I sold out despite my big talk in earlier issues of this blog. I am a disgrace. But I am a disgrace who bought some kind of expensive apricot jelly today made with real apricots. I am expecting my Pay Pal account to soon reap enough to cover the jam. And I have been submitting a few more places too like eZine, Constant Content... I don't even know if I remember all the places. I signed up for Elance'. What a procedure that is. I don't remember any big procedure when I signed up with Guru. I had to take a test on all their boring rigamarole guidelines, formats, terms, conditions. I finally got sick of reading it all and just took the test. Luckily I passed. I submitted two proposals today with samples. They want money from you at every turn. They want money to qualify your skills. Last night I decided I would do fine in qualifying my skill with computers. How was I to know the entire test would be based on Windows? I have been only a Mac user for several years now. I forget more about Windows than I ever would have thought possible after years of fighting with the old Windows XP. Yep, I flunked. Today I filled out more of my profile for potential clients. I learned that they want $15 to qualify each job you list. They don't make this sound optional either. I wonder if their take on jobs I get is higher than on Guru? They seem like big business the way they get you coming and going. I also took the time to hook up this blog with RSS and listed it with a bunch of search engines and blog directories like Technorati. I am going to get some traffic for my new Ad words if I have to start writing about sex and drugs. Just kidding. In one of its earlier incarnations, I Don't Sleep At Night, I took up a cause when I read that out West somewhere they were using nearly naked women as targets for paintball. I was outraged. I went on and on about it until I noticed that it was my highest traffic and Google search hits ever. Did I feel dumb and used. I am not doing it again. Yeah, I even signed up to give free delivery of ten articles to eZine, but I think I may have to rethink that. If I do it I "win" a premium membership which means I get to give them as many free articles as I want. Such a deal! Starvation makes for bad bargains for sure. I even applied for one lousy little publisher that insisted they didn't really care if you could write at all as long as you could use grammar and spell. I sent them a very short sample and never heard anything. Now that's just too discouraging. But I've got to do a better job of keeping my head and scruples up now that I know my daughter reads this blog. The poor thing is trying to talk herself into starting a new job serving at a sports bar. Let's just say she is not the best at taking shit from any man so I don't know how long she'll last taking some from drunken young college students. But she is telling herself she needs the job because she does. I listened to an hour-long radio interview with Deborah Ng yesterday. It was pretty interesting. She really is still a mom who blogs which I find amazing. I keep losing track of how many projects she has in the fire. I could hear her little (age five or six) kids making noise in the background and her sort of being embarrassed about it. Embarrassed? She does all that writing and still she finds time to be a full-time Mom? I tip my hat off to her. Anyhow she doesn't think blogging for networks is going to be very lucrative much longer. She is living proof that you can do well on your own. Do you know she makes $1,000 a month just on Google AdSense? That's when I decided to sign up. I read her blog with freelance openings everyday. It's the best if you ask me. About.com has a decent section on freelance writing and getting paid for blogging Now there's a job I would have liked--editing one of About.com's departments. Specifically, I had flea markets in mind, but I chickened out because they want you to know some HTML and mine is very minimal. Until next time.