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I have a confession to make. This essay will be seriously short and likewise dull. I want to confess that I have had a long-standing problem. It is that I never wanted to be a dull person. I could think of nothing more inhumane to inflict on people than dullness. For some reason, I have tried to see my life as a process of removing dullness from people. Even if I am teaching an adult education class or law class where people are completely lethargic, I take it as my mission to have them leave the class so pumped up that they can fly.

Why have I done this? Why do I think it is my mission in life to create exciting intellectual spaces for people? And why do I think that if anyone leaves any presentation I give with the sense that they are other than fully transformed that I have utterly failed in my mission in life? Well, that is overstated a tad, but you get my drift. Thus, as I turn to 71-80 in the Collegiate I do so with the lingering fear that if I create a dull space that I will have forfeited my claim to anyone's attention in the future. I think I need to follow my kids' advice for a number of things in life: "Dad, get over it!" OK, I am trying. But it is difficult for me. Let's begin.

Words for Today

Arytenoid derives from the Greek word meaning "ladle-shaped," and describes one or both of a pair of small muscles of the larynx. Asafetida relates to a dry fetid gum of several west Asian plants, but I just saw that it could also be spelled asafoetida and so I think that eliminates it from consideration. Asana is derived from Sanskrit and refers to the various sitting postures in yoga. Ascariasis is a disease caused by an ascarid (what else could cause it?), while ascites, accent on the middle syllable, refers to a fluid accumulation. Ascomycete are a group fo fungi. We can use the word assai (pronounced ah SI) to mean "very," and most frequently appears as a musical direction--allegro assai. An assignat, pronounced as syn YAH, was a bill issued as currency during the French Revolution.

Then there are the words, sometimes archaic, that might be useful or helpful in normal human communication. First, we might mention the archaic assoil, meaning to acquit, absolve or pardon. It is derived from the Latin ab-solvere, and when the b and s come together in Latin, they frequently morph into s, hence assolvere or assoil. Since none of the OED examples of this term are more recent than the mid-nineteenth century, and since most of the appearances are from far earlier days, I think assoil lies deep in the soil now, unless someone can bring it back.

Something that is assurgent is ascendant, while to be astonied means to be dazed. Asyndeton is a rhetorical device which eliminates connecting conjunctions in order to create the sense of rapidly moving action. Taking the word apart one syllable at a time we have the alpha privative, the word "syn," meaning "with" and the verb "deo," meaning "to bind." Thus asyndeton is something that loosens the things that bind words to each other. The hackneyed example is Caesar's sentence: "I came, I saw, I conquered."

Something that is asteriated has asters or "stars' in it. Normally the word is used in connection with a precious stone, so that one can have asteriated sapphire, but it is most common in nature in the form of a starfish (Asterias forbesi). An astragal is a form of a molding, beadlike in shape, used in classical architecture. It is derived from the Greek word astragalos, which is one of the vertebrae or the ball of the ankle-joint. The most frequent example of this kind of molding is the so-called "egg and dart."

When we meet atelectasis we are in the medical realm. It refers to the collapse of the expanded lung. The atelier is the artist's workshop, while an atemoya is a tropic fruit. An atheling, pronounced by dropping the final "g" sound, is an Anglo-Saxon prince. When we come to atman, which I already knew, we are in the realm of the innermost essence of the human, from the perspective of Hindu thought. Many people study Hindu philosophy, but many others have attrited from the study. Finally, when I have finished writing this, I think I am ready for an aubade. Variously defined as a song to greet the day or a morning love song, an aubade is something that every logophile should have. Don't you agree?

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