Thesauruses at the ready

Following on from Lara’s post which mentioned the very funny, very readable Boomsday, I got to thinking about some of the language that is used / abused in Buckley’s vision of Washington politics. With the backdrop of the culture of spin that the heroine Cassandra has a black belt in, the cream of the crop has to be the outrageously euphemistic ‘transitioning’: her sanitised term for the idea of voluntary euthanasia which catches on even with the people at which it is aimed.

Which reminds me, over the weekend, I discovered a fabulous website that made me feel as erudite as Stephen Fry while also making the world just a slightly better place. And it has to be better than minesweeper. www.freerice.com has a clever, and addictive, vocabulary test which donates 10 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program for each word you get correct (all done through the companies that advertise on the site). Now, I’m a big fan of ‘wordy’ words (if I can pronounce them, that is), words which roll off the tongue after jiving around your mouth. Like indelible. Or malodorous. And I now have a bunch of new favourites, such as hornswoggle (vb. to Con) and hoosegow (n. jail). My record at the moment is vocab level 42 – beat that.

Apologies to Chiara for having nabbed this blogging topic!