Somehow, I Still Suck at Scrabble

– For a while, now, I have had a mental list of words that I like and words that I do not like. It looks something like this

Words I Like:

• circumstantial
• disdain
• perplex
• listless
• adhere/cohere

Words I do NOT Like:

• mixture
• crusty
• soggy
• festering
• smiley
• important

Just to make everything clear, there is no rhyme or reason to the words I evaluate or how I evaluate them.  Mostly everything I do lacks a sense of coherency anyway.  Nonetheless, I have been hearing a word frequently that I literally want to use in every sentence I speak, all day, every day, till I can’t utter it any longer.  Ironically, I don’t think I ever use this word at all in my daily speech, but luckily the intelligent people with which I surround myself do.  The word is — regardless. Doesn’t it just melt in your mouth? Regardless.  Say it out loud, go on! Listen to the exquisiteness of its structure.

If you happen to be saying this word to yourself and wondering with the hell I’m talking about.  Don’t worry.  I’m pretty sure I have a weird word fetish that only a bizarre, thesaurus-loving English major like myself would encourage.  About 2 months ago I was sitting in my friend’s room, pregaming in a large group for his 21st birthday.  We were listening to music, talking, and having the normal social interactions you would expect from a group of college students.  Unfortunately, I looked to my left and spotted the red Webster’s Dictionary that was propping up my shot glass and chaser cup.  I screamed, “You have a dictionary!?! Oh my god! You don’t understand how many words I’ve been meaning to look up!”, and proceeded to pick it up and skim through the egg-carton colored pages.  It’s sad, really.  How can a dictionary really excite me that much?

And why couldn’t I have just used the revolutionary invention of the World Wide Web to investigate the unknown meanings of the words I had been so perplexed (<– good word!) by.  What am I, a 70-year-old lady who needs those huge buttons on her home phone? Seeing as I don’t own a home phone, and probably never will… I seem to be in the clear, but judging from this experience and personal reflection, I am clearly not a normal college girl in her early 20s.  Words, just like parties, freshly baked cookies, and new episodes of LOST, excite the hell out of me.