When Sunday is Monday

I'm scheduled to blog here tomorrow, Monday, but I'm going to be at my daughter's school tomorrow to do some fun next-to-the-last-day-before-summer-vacation stuff and I want to be able to just enjoy that and not try to cram everything else in around the edges, so...

This week the theme at TFC is supposed to be New Vocab or Interesting Quotes. That also has a connection to my daughter because just last week she had to come up with a new-to-her word and quote for school. Her homework is definitely her job but I do like to get involved in the vocabulary/quote selection because, well, I'm a big ol' word geek!

In the past, I've helped her find her way to some of my favorite words, like termagant and enisled. It's not often that I come across a word I've never seen before in a novel, unless of course it's some kind of highly specialized technical term. Enisled was the last new-to-me word I've ever seen in a novel. It comes from Wayne Johnston's amazing novel, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams.

For quotes in the past I've helped her discover Martin Luther King Jr's famous line, “I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”; and also Edgar Allan Poe's terrific "Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night."

So what did we come up with this week?

The quotation part was easy. I have a framed print of Rudyard Kipling's "If" in my basement-cave office, so we selected, "If you can fill the unforgiving minute/With sixty seconds worth of distance run."

The vocabulary selection proved more difficult. After much debate, she finally settled on furor. I was disappointed because I'd been lobbying hard for makebate, a word I'd never seen in my life before I came across it in the dictionary by chance early in the week. Makebate - have you ever heard of that before? Isn't it just a marvelous-looking word? Just in case it's as new to you as it was to me, I'll define it here. Makebate is an archaic noun from 1529 and a makebate is "one that excites contention and quarrels." Sometimes I can be such a makebate.

OK, that's all I've got for y'all today, except to congratulate all my talented TFCers on their many successes and novel releases this past week and to ask:

How about you? Any favorite words or quotes you'd care to share?

Be well. Don't forget to write.

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