Les Bonnes Choses

Asher just beat up Jude. Jude is crying. Mark your calendars.

So I was cooking last night when an obscure word popped into my head. I often experience this. Occasionally, it'll be a word that I don't actually know and will have to look up on wikipedia, such as avoirdupois -- that was the previous word from the sky. I don't know where I may have encountered it before, other than that the word has french roots, so I had to look it up, because to have some peas doesn't make a damn bit of sense.

Yesterday's word from the heavens was defenestration. Go ahead and look it up if you're not familiar with the word; nobody will think less of you because it's got a pretty limited scope of usage. I did already know what that word meant -- that's not the source of my puzzlement. Rather, I got to thinking about how words enter the vocabulary. In the case of a verb like defenestration, before the word existed, people must have been instead using the word's definition, as in "I'm going to march over to the town hall and throw the mayor out the window". And if you only have to string a sentence like that together once or twice in your life, this might work fine for you. It's not until you often find yourself tossing people out the window that you might find it handy to have a single word to describe your intentions. In fact, using a word like defenestrate buys you all the more time to defenestrate other villagers. Of course, nobody else will understand your fancy word unless they too have been emptying townsmen from the windows like last night's bedpan. In other words, the admittance of a word like defenestrate into the English language suggests that there must have been period in our history where it was raining men (hallelujah).



Between the dictionary.com and wikipedia entries for the word, it appears that the word appeared sometime in the early 1600s in Prague. I guess what I'm saying is that, if you ever find yourself with the opportunity to go back in time, check the dictionary before selecting your destination.