Column - My maladroit maunder

Talk about it

Just think of how much you could increase your vocabulary by learning only one new word each day.

That’s what I was thinking when I signed up to receive the “Word of the Day” e-mail from Dictionary.com.

Now, almost every day I get to peek into my e-mail and see words like trencherman, sartorial, calumny and coterminous. Although some of these new words (such as harridan, hirsute or schadenfreude) are for all practical purposes, useless, and could just as well be defenestrated, it’s still interesting to discover new words and dream of learning and using them someday. Most of the time, I don’t take the time to learn these quotidian words, but just glance at them and get back to my travail. But still, they might be useful someday; so I’ve been filing away this olla podrida of sonorous words – just in case.

A while ago I had an idea: Maybe I could use this agglomeration of disparate words in one of my columns. If I could use this congeries of words en masse to get away from my inveterate focus on controversial subjects, perhaps I could mollify my yen to do something different; something silly, meaningless and yet, entertaining, like other writers do. It would be a complete bouleversement.

Yet because of some trepidation about turning a perfectly good column into a foofaraw of verbose tarradiddle, I kept cogitating on something controversial to write about.

There were a couple of possibilities that made my choler rise:

At first, I thought I might write a riposte to the pertinacious supporters of the County Road 42 project; something that could countervail against the sempiternal hullabaloo and bring some common sense to the cacophony. The problem, as I see it, is that the seemingly ubiquitous supporters of turning the country road into a monstrous excrescence, are actually a moiety, and do not live on or drive this road every day. For them, this incongruous superhighway is seen as the very ne plus ultra of progress, and they lambaste anyone who does not agree with them as an antediluvian ignoramus. The worst part is the specious reasoning and hyperbole – that not acting will be the portent of incalculable pain and suffering – that they use to distract people from the real issue. The crux of the matter is that this is an agrestic area that is not capacious enough for such a draconian expansion, which will efface the bucolic nature of the area.

But, I decided not to write about that bootless topic because a fustian rant would not assuage the maelstrom of comments from the dour supporters of the project, or clarify the turbid controversy surrounding it.

At about the same time, I also considered writing about the inscrutable and fractious protesters who gathered in St. Paul to contravene the Republican National Convention. This gallimaufry of inexorable Republican-haters showed their true colors during the event by trying to hector everyone in the area into believing, nolens volens, what they believe. Far from being irenic, these protesters showed they are mostly bellicose and inimical to anyone who would dare to disagree with them. Their stentorian caterwauling only showed how callow many of the members of that cavalcade were, and the egregious behavior of some made them all ineffectual.

However, in the end, my acrid animadversion toward the protesters wasn’t my highest desideratum, and serendipity led me in a different direction. So once again, I resumed my machination of making a melange of multifarious words into a magniloquent menagerie. Being a neophyte at using these new words and phrases, my abecedarian efforts will likely make this aberrant conspectus tortuous and somniferous, if not a maladroit maunder.

But, who knows? It could also slake my desire for gravitas, or cause me to doff it altogether as I become more acclimated to the diaphanous, abstruse writing of a wiseacre.

Now if I could just aggrandize my brain to remember what all these salient words mean, then all would be copacetic.