I stumbled upon web site this morning that included someone's idea of the 100 most beautiful words in the English language. My brother, Marc, is an etymologist and quite the grammarian. I have never considered myself such, though I love to learn new words. But I thought it might be fun to write a blog with as many of these "beautiful" words as I can, along the lines of Cat in the Hat. Following is my attempt. See if you can pick out the "beautiful" words. At the end I'll tell you how many I actually used.
One word of warning - BEWARE the red herrings! I have included other words I like, though they are not included in the list of the 100 most "beautiful" words.
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I have never been an ailurophile. I've never even had a ripple, not one scintilla of affinity for the animals, though I was an erstwhile owner about 10 years ago. They were minx's, though, with no tails. The two of them, named Skeeter and Midnight, were born in a rabbit hutch and were wild as bucks. We got them just after they were born, but they beleaguered our home with their endless scratching. So much to my wife's chagrin, our ephemeral proprietorship ended.
If the truth be told, I was imbued by my parents with much higher regard for dogs. Not only are dogs much more becoming to me, they're just a lot friendlier. Sure, I'm a little inured, since I've owned dogs since I was just more than 7-years old.
Shortly after Kelly and I were married we bought our first dog. His name was Slider. He was a comely dog, the conflation of a German Shepherd and a Beagle, and I actually cared about him for a time.
But being the spawn of those two lines of canine pedigree, he was the shedin'-est dog I've ever known. It didn't take long before he was my nemesis, The Riddler to my Batman, the Kryptonite to my Clark Kent. The efflorescence of our friendship faded quickly, as Mother's Day flowers in a dry vase.
Slider was with us for 14 years, but as with all things, he grew old. He became desultory and languid. His lassitude turned to indolent lethargy, and he began marking his demesne, both inside and outside the house. Good times with him became fugacious, and I could tell that he longed for the halcyon days of his youth when he would gambol uncaringly among the daisies in the park across the street from our condominium.
Slider died on a Friday morning. They told us at the vets office that they would cremate him and sprinkle his ashes in a bucolic atmosphere out in Strasburg where he could run and play with abandon for eternity.
The kids, of course, were woebegone with grief. The imbroglio we experienced in our family after Slider died was labyrinthine. One day I was the bad guy for not liking the poor dog and the next it was Kelly, because she took him to the vet that day. Neither of us were winners in the minds of our children.
So Kelly and I talked about a new dog, one that could be an inside dog, one that the kids could walk and take care of.
It turns out that we've had that dulcet little pooch for a week today. Her name is Charlie, the mixture of a Bichon Frise and a Poodle. A Bichon-Poo. Her effervescent ebullience is contagious, and though she's still in her very incipient growing stages and is a relative ingénue, she seems to be a panacea for all things wrong in our home. She is a lot of work, no doubt, but her enthusiasm calms the heart of even this savage beast. She's already brought a lot of felicity to our tiny bungalow and is the cynosure of all the neighbors. We've got dog-sitters lined up from now to eternity.
Interesting thing is that we were actually just looking around for another dog. But the epiphany hit me this morning. It's been serendipitous. We actually found a lot of cure while we were looking for a dog.
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I used 35 of the "beautiful" words in this blog. How many did you pick out? Leave me a comment!
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