Fun with a Thesaurus

Or, Frivolity with a Reference Book.

I have always believed myself to be good at creative writing and particularly as a young child, loved exploring my imagination and scribbling it down on paper.  On school records, my attainment was invariably awarded a higher grade than the effort I put in.   Aren’t I brrrillliant? Rah rah rah!

Since starting this blog, it has dawned on me just how small my vocabulary is.   I’m sure it has shrunk.  Well, maybe not shrunk so much as stalled in its development.  It was growing so beautifully and at least at the same rate as the physical me but in the last couple of decades, I have definitely overtaken it, in the growth stakes.  It’s as though it hit a few pot holes on the way here and has suffered serious damage….

My memory is appalling now.  I don’t know if that is to blame for my word shrinkage.  I can usually only remember word for word, things that are of great interest to me.  

If I find a subject remotely dull, my brain shuts down, like Homer Simpson when Marge wanted to confide in him and he lowered his sunglasses that had eyes painted on them and said, ‘tell me all about it” then quietly fell asleep behind them.

I really like Russell Brand because he is very, very funny and rude but I love him for his use of our language.  I can listen to him for ages and can visualise as he speaks, like when Rolf Harris is painting and you can watch the brush strokes develop and take shape.  I love that Russell may be encouraging the ‘text n lol’ generation to talk, ‘all proper like an’ all that’.

Obviously and boringly I adore Mr Stephen Fry too.  He is beautifully eloquent in an effortless, non patronising way.  To me he is almost other worldly. He’s a kind of deity that lesser mortals gaze upon, to witness wisdom emanating from him in rainbows and to bask in the warm, cuddly glow of his intelligence.

I love clever, witty, intelligent people.  At work, I speak to people all day who cannot even be bothered to open their mouths properly to communicate what they have rung up for. The syllables literally shuffle and scuff out of their orifices and grate as they barge their way, spitting and puffing into my ears. 

They’re so rude.  I’d love get all Marjory Dawes on them.  I would like to send these people back to school. 

With that in mind, I bought myself a thesaurus. 

I am so behind the times in the technical world.  I don’t have an ipad.  My (so big it only just constitutes as mobile) phone doesn’t even have a built in camera. OH THE SHAME!

I don’t like the idea of Sky TV (too much telly) and I don’t even own a Kindle!............................... I still buy books made from paper!

It’s not a dislike of all things new, I just can’t be arsed to keep up and most of the time, couldn’t afford to either. 

What I do hate is how thoughtless most communication is now.  The reliance on ‘spell check’ is frightening. Convenience has overtaken the poetry of our beautiful language.  If the young are already abbreviating whole sentences, (pmsl, lol, lmao),  by the time my kids are hanging about with their mates, hoods up, they’ll be conversing by using just beeps and clicks! WTF!?!

Sometimes when I ask my son how his day at nursery was, he grunts back like a teenager, ‘don’t knooooow’, or, ‘can’t remember’! Other times, like this morning, amidst the mad rush, he decides to engage brain & mouth and told me in an animated fashion, all about how the lion told the other animals that the bat had never seen, ‘the eye of the stooooorm’!  All wide eyed and theatrical, he looked like a miniature Mystic Meg forewarning of perils to come.  Moments like that give me hope.   

Anyway, whilst enjoying my 99p thesaurus, I began to wonder about the great and famous quotes and sayings throughout history and whether they’d have sounded different had the owner of said quote had a thesaurus to hand. 

Here are a few I had a jiggle about with;

Hover in a similar way to a refined caterpillar, insert toxin akin to an apis.

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. Mohammed Ali

Whilst on a recent visit to the Land of Nod, I deviated from reality and I’d like to tell you all about it.

I have a dream - Martin Luther King

A singular tread for a person, an almighty vault for the human race.

One small step for man. One giant leap for mankind. Neil Armstrong

A downward jerk of the cranium is as adequate as a spasmodic twitch of the optics, to an equine quadruped, devoid of visual capacity.

A nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse. Dunno who said this but my Irish friend Catherine told me the alternative.

Whilst trawling through ‘famous quotes’, I have discovered that Winston Churchill was hilarious.  I knew he was cool but I didn’t know just how sharp and funny he was.  Aw, England once had a geat PM! ;(

Here are a few of his quotes;

It is the inalienable right of every Englishman to pronounce foreign words exactly as he pleases.

Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.

When I look back on all these worries I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened.

Those that fail to learn from history, are doomed to repeat it.

Out of intense complexities, intense simplicities emerge

It is impossible to obtain a conviction for sodomy from an English jury. Half of them don't believe that it can physically be done, and the other half are doing it.

If you are going through hell, keep going.

And possibly my favourite;

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

I have just been ORDERED by HIM to end this post with a ‘quote’ (?)

With a sudden, bewildering aggression He jumped up and blurted out, “If I saw Prince in the street, I would definitely kick him in. Stick that on your blog”!