Here’s an Odyssey of How a
I was in love with writing—and even grammar—long before I was in love with words. I became smitten with words about the same time I fell in love with my husband about sixty-three years ago. When we opened the door to our new one-bedroom apartment ($75. a month, I kid you not!), we found a tattered book that once belonged to a previous tenant. It was one of the early paperbacks (pocketbooks) called something like “A Word a Day” and we committed exactly that—one word a day—to memory before we went to sleep each night. We did it together. That list was spot-on for that time in our lives when we were both still undergraduates. It was a list of words that might appear on an SAT exam or a Graduate Record Exam (GRE). My vocabulary-intensity rating went up and down after that, mostly down. Jobs, children, a business interfered. But later it crescendoed along with my interest in poetry. And then one day decades later—a cloudy, uneventful day during our self-imposed isolation during the Days of Covid —an email from WordGenius appeared in my email box. I may have signed up for it. If I did, I don’t remember, and I was a bit annoyed. Spam, I thought. But I played their little games and got hooked on words again. Then the emails kept getting more frequent. New and features on language that were even more fun. It was a little like the internet in general, designed for addiction. I was especially intrigued with the words that were directly related to writing. They reminded me of a column I once wrote for a print magazine in the early 2000s for…was it Writer’s Magazine? I remembered what the column was called “Affecting Words” so I did a search in my computer and there they were. Every single column. Soon I was collecting from the new email games I subscribe to—names like WordDaily and WordGenius. Merriam-Webster has one, too. I was intrigued because I was learning more writing-related words even after a couple of decades in the publishing industry, let alone all my years in journalism and marketing. It didn’t occur to me I might use them in a book again. Been there, done that. I have a booklet called Great Little Last-Minute Editing Tips published by Modern History Press. (Find it with the rest of my HowToDoItFrugally Series of books from that press at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BTXQL27T. That list is getting longer, and I started thinking about a kind of vocabulary reference book designed for my favorite niche market—writers! I would be based on the love of words—especially words associated with writing and from a writer’s associated needs from the fields of marketing, public relations, journalism…you get the idea. But it would also be a little memoirish, something like Carolyn See’s “Making a Literary Life. (https://bit.ly/LiteryLife).” She is now deceased and continues to inspire me, continues to make me grateful to be a writer.
Vocabulary Book Comes To Be by Carolyn Howard-Johnson
A Short Memoir on Loving Words (some of this was also published i n ISWG’s blog!)
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