The Writing Life
Glottal sounds and appears to be an odd word choice. It certainly wasn’t the first word to come to mind when I started the latest installment in the Alphabet Adventure. Other words, like seashells left after the tide’s retreat, surfaced: glory, grand (related: grandiose and grandeur), garbage, glint (presumably because of Irc, a crow in the Pellinor series), and gainsay.
[Read more…] about Alphabet Adventure: G is for Glottal
I still remember the words from a children’s song learned many, many years ago.
Jesus loves the little children,
All the children of the world.
Red and yellow, black and white,
They are precious in his sight.
Jesus loves the little children
Of the world.
I remember teaching the song, too, as a fifteen-year-old corralling a group of ten to twelve preschoolers. Perhaps simplistic words, but they contain truth. Jesus loves all the children, all the people, of the world. He loves them, regardless of skin tone or what they have or have not done. He loves them, and he wants me to love them, too.
Flibbertigibbet sounds like “bibbidi-bobbidi-boo” or “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” The sound is appropriate, considering that flibbertigibbet means a silly or flighty person. All three phrases convey a sense of the nonsensical and the downright “atrocious.” (Thank you, Mary Poppins.)
[Read more…] about Alphabet Adventure: F is for Flibbertigibbet
Friends, family, countrymen, lend me your ears. Hmm. Wait. That’s not quite right. I’m not in a Shakespeare play. However, I still ask you to lend me your ears because I need your help to return to SXSW.
“There are different questions that an aspiring artist can ask.
“One question is, ‘What must I do to be famous?’
“This question will open up a writer to all manner of destructive forces both within and without. We’ve all seen it play out.
“A different question, and one asked much less often is, ‘What must I do to make this sustainable?’
“Songwriting, painting, acting, writing—these are all crafts that one can practice over the course of a lifetime. You can get better — grow — for a long, long time.”
— Linford Detweiler, Over the Rhine
