Words

(It is my 100th post! I wanted to dress up the cats in festive gear and make a dialogue box with them congratulating me, but you can understand the difficulty in executing that vision.)

Instead, I'll celebrate words! All 1 million+ of them, according to The Global Language Monitor. I am not quite sure of the credibility, but it's still interesting. 'Web 2.0' beat out such words as defriend, financial tsunami, octomom (thank god), slumdog and recessionista to become the millionth word. At a million, English has the most words of any language. (There are about 200,000 in the standard dictionary - these million are derived purely from citations in worldwide literature, including the internet.)

An interesting tidbit from the website:

In Shakespeare’s day, there were only 2,000,000 speakers of English and fewer than 100,000 words. Shakespeare himself coined about 1,700 words. Thomas Jefferson invented about 200 words, and George W. Bush created a handful, the most prominent of which is, misunderestimate.

Shakespeare - how awesome is that guy? George Bush? Not so much.

Yesterday Gabe and I got up early (for a Saturday) and went to the Pride Parade - more on that in next post. On the way back to the T (subway) Gabe suggested we stop at the Boston Public Library in Copley Square. My dehydration and tiredness set in and I said I could only go if I took a brief nap on the lawn in front of Trinity Church. It was a wonderful mini-nap except for the sunburn. Then we went into the library - there are parts that are beautiful, like the stairway:




















There are parts that smell slightly reminiscent of urine, too. While in the basement we saw tucked into the corner an odd participatory art piece.

I'm embarrassed to say I haven't been to the library in years, probably. One of my last memories of a library is going to central square and pulling out a volume of poetry - flying out beside it was a plastic bottle of vodka. Maybe that put me off for a while. But generally I LOVE libraries - being surrounded by words, stories and thoughts. One of my favorite scenes in all of film is the library scene in Wings of Desire. So it was nice to be back in there, and I left with some Faulkner novels and a new author to me: A.B. Yehosua.

When I came downstairs this morning Gabe was on the couch reading this:


He was reading it because I told him a while back it's probably my most favorite novel. The story is horrible, but it's one of the best displays of an author's grasp of the English language. Nabokov is like a puppet master that can make words do ANYTHING. Gabe has been reading it off and on for a few months but really hasn't commented on it. He didn't seem particularly captivated by it, but I think he just had to finish it. So this morning he finally did. He put it down on the table with a sigh. What did you think??!! I ask. "That was gross." Though Gabe is perhaps not destined to be a literary critic I appreciate he plowed through nearly 300 pages of grossness since it's a favorite of mine.

After finishing the book Gabe made breakfast. I went out to help and saw this:

First, you might be able to see here how our gym time is paying off. Second, you can also see why we need to visit the gym so frequently: look at the pan. Gabriel is cooking salami in BUTTER! Yes it was good, but seriously, sweetie?! Sigh.