Pertolerate: Thanks telling me you don’t read my nonsense

It is rarely a good idea to complain about you. Yes you, the readers of this newspaper. Doing such a thing tends to make you say “To the Dickens with you, I’ll stop reading your piffling little column!”

So to clarify, I’m not complaining about you, specifically, because you are reading the second paragraph. I’m complaining about people who only read the “word of the week” at the bottom.

Several have emailed and, despite my delicate feelings, commented on the weekly word while blithely admitting they don’t bother with the rest of my burblings.

I’ll get over it

It would be presumptuous for any scribbler to assume everyone hangs on every word they pen. But I’ll allow myself a wry smile if we have reached the nadir of indolence in the human race where people interested in words don’t bother reading a column about words.

Never mind. I’ll get over it. Eventually.

I spend a ridiculous amount of time selecting, rejecting, and reselecting candidates for the word of the week. I try to find beguiling, useful, even amusing words and sometimes succeed. Other times I wonder.

I should be grateful anyone even notices, far less bothers to comment.

There is one overarching criterion for a “word”. I want to achieve a thing rare in the modern cut-and-paste world: originality.

I subscribe to several online dictionaries, grammar mavens, and word gurus who send me a “word a day”. I do this partly because I like words, but mostly because I strike everyone else’s selections off my list of “possibles”.

Perhaps it is just my jaundiced outlook but I find, increasingly, there is very little that is truly original these days. From “sampled” songs to “tribute acts”, from retellings of old stories, to films on their fifth or sixth sequel. I hear Indiana Jones and the Walking Frame of Doom (or whatever it is called) is soon to hit cinemas.

My quest for the lesser-spotted word sees me spend happy hours looking through my collection of dictionaries to find one that isn’t too obscure, isn’t well known, but has a certain “something”.

I reject more than I select. Xyster (instrument for scraping bones); bilbo (sword renowned for flexibility); suppedaneum (support for the feet of a crucified person) are nearly, but not quite, the proper type of word. I don’t tend to like nouns.

Anhistous (without recognisable structure); indign (undeserving, unworthy); fructure (the use or enjoyment of something); aggerate (to heap up) are the type of word I like.

In any case, this is the sort of interesting content (or rubbish, you decide) that mononomial (consisting of only one term) readers are missing.