My whole life, I’ve loved words.  Enough so that, when I was just four or five, whenever I learned a new one, I’d walk around for the subsequent week trying to wedge it into as many sentences as I possibly could.  A voracious reader from even that age, I stumbled across most of my new words in books.  And, each time I did, I was assiduous about looking it up.

But, over the decades, I ran into fewer and fewer words that I didn’t know.  Until, eventually, I had fallen out of the definition-hunting habit.  When I did find something new, stopping my reading, even just to make note of the word, seemed an undue hassle.  And I could almost always roughly grasp the word from context.  So, instead of pausing to Google, I’d just plow ahead.

Back in November, however, I came across a surprising use of ‘salient’ in an Economist article.  And, as I happened to be sitting next to a physical dictionary, I paused to look the word up, discovering a second definition I had never known: an outwardly projecting part of a fortification or line of defense.

I have a longstanding weakness for secondary meanings – ‘pedestrian,’ in the sense of ‘commonplace,’ being a favorite – so I wrote the new definition of salient down in my journal.  And then, a few weeks later, I stumbled across ‘anatine’ in a short story, looked it up, and wrote that down, too.

From there, a new habit was born – or, more accurately, an old one rebirthed.  In the few months since, I’ve already picked up otiose, rachitic, oneiric, diluents, vitrine.  And I’ve reminded myself of words I knew, but that were parked too far in the recesses of my brain to be called up for conversational use: parvenu, febrile, palimpsest.

Much like my five year old self, I am now truly smitten with those discoveries and re-discoveries.  Though, unlike the words I was excited about 35 years back, these I’m sadly forced to largely keep to myself.  Use ‘anatine’ or ‘oneiric’ in conversation with all but the nerdiest and wordiest of fellow readers, and I’d likely get nothing but a confused stare in response.

Even so, I’ll be back to looking up new words as I discover them, and will continue to expand my list.  If nothing else, it makes me awfully happy just to read them over, to roll them around in my head, to see how they feel coming to life on my tongue.