Slice of Life: When You Meet a New Word . . .

Today I join my fellow bloggers in "serving up a slice" 

to the Tuesday Slice of Life (SOL) community.

Thanks to Stacey, Betsy, Dana, Beth, Kathleen, Deb, Lisa, and Melanie

                    for hosting this meeting place each Tuesday and nurturing our writing lives.

When you meet a new word, you can be sure that you'll encounter it again soon.  There's something about that new meeting that makes you ripe for more encounters with the word.  I like to call it "the popcorn effect" - meet a new word and it's bound to begin popping up in other places.  I noticed it all the time when I taught sixth grade as we explored our weekly WOW (word of the week).  My students would come in excited to share newfound discoveries of our weekly words in their world.  "I heard arduous on a PBS special on mountain climbing."  "My math teacher said that half the class was stymied by the problem."  Usually we'd had time for three words by the time our parent night was scheduled in the fall.  I challenged the parents to use the words of the week in the note they left for their child.  It was fun to see the creative ways the parents would utilize arduous, perturbed, and plethora in their notes.

I recently met a new word, lagniappe, in Margaret Simon's post.  I had no idea how to pronounce it, so off I went to the computer to hear the pronunciation.  I liked this word so much that I jotted it into my notebook along with Margaret's definition "a little something extra," and the pronunciation (lahn yahp).  Imagine my surprise this past week when my husband showed me the following sentence in the Federal Income Tax textbook for a class he's teaching and asked if I knew the word "lagniappe."  

I grabbed my writer's notebook and told him that thanks to my friend, Margaret, from Louisiana, I had the definition and the pronunciation for this word!  I love how the reader can use the context clues to find the meaning.  There it is, right in the textbook, "something extra thrown in" just as Margaret had defined it for me in her post.  And this convoluted sentence from a law school textbook housed a lagniappe for me - one of our 6th grade words of the week, benevolence.  Even though I've been retired for two years, my heart still leaps when I hear or see one of our words of the week at work in the real world!