Dr. Woo
Subscriber since: November 2009
Location: Wilmington, NC
About Me
Hi Great Spellers! Frozen words didn't make it into VT's dictionary. If you guess 3 times then surrender, words like bulwarks, expugnable, sunshiny, etc. are revealed, but if you type them into the thesaurus, they aren't recognized as real words. TAINTAWORD! If the blank comes up I guess a taintawerd and sometimes get it right! Often the surrendered word works at the next freeze, but not always. I guess VT will have to catch the taintawerds at the next revision--for what it's worth, I sent a list--maybe thirty words. I teach literature at UNC Wilmington. Several of my granddaughters call me "Nanny Woo"--hence my original nickname. The word "misled" was one I used to pronounce with a long i--my-sulled--sounds worse somehow with my pronunciation. For my son, the word was "effigy" which he made sound like the South Pacific island: e-Fiji. If you gotta be burned.... I love words: their allusiveness, their slippery elusiveness, their mystery, their power, their pitiful insufficiency.
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My Favorites

Favorite Word:

deliquescent
At the beginning of The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot gives us a glimpse of the Sybil--in Latin with an embedded quotation in Greek. She has wished for long life but forgotten to wish for immortal youth and has therefore become deliquescent--has found(to echo Hamlet) her too too sullied/sallied/solid flesh to melt and resolve itself into a dew. What a beautiful word for decay. But it also means "having an affinity for water" and I love to swim, and melting wouldn't be a bad way to go, after all.
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Least Favorite Word:

bored
The world is so full of a number of things. . . . to be bored is to be boring. Don't tell me you're bored, especially if you are younger than I am. How could anyone possibly be bored with all the words and ideas whirling like butterflies in the wind, ready to be caught in the nets of consciousness? Flying fritillaries! Did I spell that right?
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Favorite Quote:

"Reading for pleasure is an extraordinary activity. The black squiggles on the white page are still as the grave, colorless as the moonlit desert, but they give the skilled reader a pleasure as acute as the touch of a loved body."
- Victor Nell, quoted by Daniel Boyarin

Favorite Topics:

Blogs:

Invented Languages Q&A

Books:

Remembering Salinger
Shtick Lit

Dictionaries:

Quotable Moments of '09
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Fiction writing:

Rules for Writing Fiction
Get Ready for NaNoWriMo!

Fun:

Grammar Rules!

Libraries:

The Digital Librarian

Linguistics:

A Troop of One
More on "Text(ed)"

Online:

Should Everybody Write?
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Grammar Rules!

Poetry:

To a Thesaurus

Storytelling:

Storytelling Blogs
Keep It Short

Web tools:

Your Virtual Bookshelf

Writers:

Rules for Writing Fiction
Remembering Salinger

Young readers:

Reading What You Want