It doesn't sound any better in German - click here
It's today", squeaked Piglet. "My favorite day", said Pooh. I can relate to that because even on an overcast morning like this, it's still my favourite day. People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day. There is no hurry. We shall get there some day.
This week has two high points: yesterday was Garbage Collection Day and I wheeled out the red and yellow bin, and tomorrow is Nelligen Market Day when I wheel myself across the bridge to perhaps find an interesting book or just have a late Rural-Fire-Brigade-Sausage-Sizzle breakfast. Or just listen to the local gossip. It's so much more fun to listen to people who don't use long, difficult words.
Words like dunandunate which I shall be dunandunating all day long because it's a recent addition to my vocabulary. It reminds me of penul-timate which had infested our writing during my days on Bougainville. People added entire paragraphs so as to be able to refer to the penul-timate one even before they had written it.
Today's word craze is much less demanding. Take awesome. "Could you please tell me what time it is?" "It's a quarter to ten." "Awesome!!!" What's awesome about that??? Deceased is another one. In police par-lance people - the loved-ones - never die. They decease. And the rela-tives then seek closure even if the loved-one was their mother-in-law.
What seems like a long time ago, sitting on the jetty with little Rover, there was no need for words. We just sat there and looked at the river because the river knows: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.
P.S. A reader pointed out to me that dunandunate would be a wonderful word if there was such a one. He claims it was 'made up' by some over-enthusiastic neologist. By some estimates, English has about one million words (although most linguists would take that estimate with a chunk of salt) and each one of them was 'made up' ever since some caveman at some prehistoric time modulated his unintelligible grunt to indicate to his cavewoman that he liked her cavecooking. Shakespeare did the rest.
