I opened my thesaurus to the word “quash” and actually said out loud, “oooh quash!” What a great word! It’s like the lazy person’s way of saying “squash” – who needs that pesky extra letter when you can just leave it off? And bonus – it means the same thing! Unless you’re talking about the vegetable… wait, is a squash a vegetable? You’ve gotta be careful about that sort of thing. You remember what happened with the avocado, right? (Click the link for a story.)
There are so many great words associated with quash too! Words like crush, hush up, overthrow, quell, rescind, and squelch. The word “squelch” always makes me think of walking in the pouring rain when I’ve forgotten my umbrella. It’s the feeling my feet get when they’re sodden inside my shoes and socks. There’s a feeling I’d rather quash.
It starts with a speck, a mere morsel, an element of thought in the vast space that is the universe of the mind. It’s a whiff, a spore at first – hardly a niggle like the frustratingly fading emotion that was a dream that’s just out of reach. A word on the tip of the tongue that can’t be read, even if it’s stuck out agonizingly far enough to see with eyes crossed, brows twisted to the point that even the scalp strains to pluck it off.
But then it begins to grow. Like a jigsaw puzzle made of sky on which the clouds roll in, the wind giving direction. Hues of gray and white and silver – yes! Is that a silver lining?
Bigger and bigger it fills the spaces until all else is blotted out… bits and pieces get lost in the shuffle of what is this and what is that. Hearing strains inward instead of out and nothing nothing nothing else begins to matter but that which started as a speck and has now grown, fills life and limb and thought and sky in the most amazing double rainbow!
It’s Friday; time for your Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt! For those of us participating in the A-Z Challenge, the letter of the day for tomorrow is “P.” To potentially make our Saturday blogging experience easier, your prompt will again start with that letter. Remember, the prompt word is really just a take-off point to get you started. As long as your post is stream of consciousness writing and somehow contains the prompt, your post qualifies for SoCS. Here we go!
Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is: “piece/peace.” Make one or both your theme or just include them somehow in your post. Enjoy!
After you’ve written your Saturday post tomorrow, please link it here at this week’s prompt page and check to make sure it’s here in the comments so others can find it and see your awesome Stream of Consciousness post. Anyone can join in!
To make your post more visible, use the SoCS badge! Just paste it in your Saturday post so people browsing the reader will immediately know your post is stream of consciousness and/or pin it as a widget to your site to show you’re a participant. Wear it with pride!!
Badge by: Doobster @ Mindful Digressions
Here are the rules:
1. Your post must be stream of consciousness writing, meaning no editing, (typos can be fixed) and minimal planning on what you’re going to write.
2. Your post can be as long or as short as you want it to be. One sentence – one thousand words. Fact, fiction, poetry – it doesn’t matter. Just let the words carry you along until you’re ready to stop.
3. There will be a prompt every week. I will post the prompt here on my blog on Friday, along with a reminder for you to join in. The prompt will be one random thing, but it will not be a subject. For instance, I will not say “Write about dogs”; the prompt will be more like, “Make your first sentence a question,” or “Begin with the word ‘The’.”
4. Ping back! It’s important, so that I and other people can come and read your post! For example, in your post you can write “This post is part of SoCS:” and then copy and paste the URL found in your address bar at the top of this post into yours. Your link will show up in my comments, for everyone to see. The most recent pingbacks will be found at the top.
5. Read at least one other person’s blog who has linked back their post. Even better, read everyone’s! If you’re the first person to link back, you can check back later, or go to the previous week, by following my category, “Stream of Consciousness Saturday,” which you’ll find right below the “Like” button on my post.
6. Copy and paste the rules (if you’d like to) in your post. The more people who join in, the more new bloggers you’ll meet and the bigger your community will get!
Anyone who would like to try it out, feel free to use the “One-Liner Wednesday” title in your post, and if you do, you can ping back here to help your blog get more exposure. To execute a ping back, just copy the URL in the address bar on this post and paste it somewhere in the body of your post. Your link will show up in the comments below. Please ensure that the One-Liner Wednesday you’re pinging back to is this week’s! Otherwise, no one will likely see it but me.
As with Stream of Consciousness Saturday (SoCS), if you see a ping back from someone else in my comment section, click and have a read. It’s bound to be short and sweet.
Unlike SoCS, this is not a prompt so there’s no need to stick to the same “theme.”
The rules that I’ve made for myself (but don’t always follow) for “One-Liner Wednesday” are:
Well that worked out well. I don’t think I need to take a picture of my thesaurus this week to prove that “journalist” is in fact the second-last word on the left-hand page that I turned to… you trust me, right?
Honesty in journalism is something that’s apparently hard to come by these days. I don’t often listen to or read the news. I wish I had less going on in my life that I had the luxury to put other people’s and countries’ business closer to the top of my priority list, but it just ain’t happenin’. My mother was recently diagnosed with ‘mixed dementia’ which includes a touch of Alzheimer’s, and though I haven’t even properly researched what that means, I have been led to understand that the difference between dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease is attitude. Let’s just say she hasn’t been easy to deal with these past few years and it seems to be getting worse by the day. While she hasn’t displayed any of the outbursts you sometimes hear about, nor has she gone wandering (thank goodness) but I’m finding myself agreeing to being the stupid one (her term) more often than not to avoid arguments. I really do need to learn more about this disease.
So where was I? Oh yes, journalists. I can’t imagine myself as a journalist. I can’t interview someone to save my life, and I’m afraid that any reporting I did would end up more speculation and fiction than actual true story. I tend toward writing fiction – my imagination is probably one of the most prevalent parts of my personality.
Let’s see what synonyms we have here: hack. Yeah, that’d be me. Chronicler. Sounds painful. Oh Oh OH! Periodicalist! I like that word, though my spell check doesn’t. Let’s try using it in a sentence.
The periodicalist was found guilty of dangling participles. His sentence; to be reviewed…
Today is Friday and that means it’s time for your Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt. Yay! Being that we’re still in the throes of the A-Z Challenge, I’ve decided once again to do something that may potentially make our lives easier – or at least our Saturday blogging experience easier. Remember, the prompt word is really just a take-off point to get you started. As long as your post is stream of consciousness writing and somehow contains the prompt, your post qualifies for SoCS. Here we go!
Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is: “-jour-“: add a prefix or suffix to complete it or use it as the French word for “day.” Have fun!
After you’ve written your Saturday post tomorrow, please link it here at this week’s prompt page and check to make sure it’s here in the comments so others can find it and see your awesome Stream of Consciousness post. Anyone can join in!
To make your post more visible, use the SoCS badge! Just paste it in your Saturday post so people browsing the reader will immediately know your post is stream of consciousness and/or pin it as a widget to your site to show you’re a participant. Wear it with pride!!
Badge by: Doobster @ Mindful Digressions
Here are the rules:
1. Your post must be stream of consciousness writing, meaning no editing, (typos can be fixed) and minimal planning on what you’re going to write.
2. Your post can be as long or as short as you want it to be. One sentence – one thousand words. Fact, fiction, poetry – it doesn’t matter. Just let the words carry you along until you’re ready to stop.
3. There will be a prompt every week. I will post the prompt here on my blog on Friday, along with a reminder for you to join in. The prompt will be one random thing, but it will not be a subject. For instance, I will not say “Write about dogs”; the prompt will be more like, “Make your first sentence a question,” or “Begin with the word ‘The’.”
4. Ping back! It’s important, so that I and other people can come and read your post! For example, in your post you can write “This post is part of SoCS:” and then copy and paste the URL found in your address bar at the top of this post into yours. Your link will show up in my comments, for everyone to see. The most recent pingbacks will be found at the top.
5. Read at least one other person’s blog who has linked back their post. Even better, read everyone’s! If you’re the first person to link back, you can check back later, or go to the previous week, by following my category, “Stream of Consciousness Saturday,” which you’ll find right below the “Like” button on my post.
6. Copy and paste the rules (if you’d like to) in your post. The more people who join in, the more new bloggers you’ll meet and the bigger your community will get!
Oooh, brrrr. Here’s a chilly subject. Appropriate considering we’re getting freezing rain here. Tiny little glaciers falling from the sky. The kind of weather that lifts your shoulders to your earlobes.
Speaking of cold shoulders, (what a segue, eh?) the first synonym in my thesaurus for glacial is antagonistic. Along those lines are also inimical (I absolutely cannot pronounce that word. Can you?) and unfriendly. This immediately brings trolls to my mind; the glacial denizens of the internet.
We’re all waiting to cross that bridge, aren’t we? If we haven’t already of course. That icy, slippery causeway to misery – commentary’s dip into a hostile Arctic abyss.
Or.
Just ignore them and they’ll go away.
The word, “glacial” also brings to mind my childhood and my favourite pasttime back then – figure skating. Although I practiced for eight years, I never did perfect the art of the axel. For those of you not too familiar, it’s a jump that involves taking off from a forward facing direction, spinning one and a half rotations (for a single axel) in the air and landing on the opposite foot facing the other direction. I simply didn’t have the guts to really give it 100% of my effort. I did enjoy coaching, though. Figure skating is one of those things that fits well into the adage, “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.”
Anyone who would like to try it out, feel free to use the “One-Liner Wednesday” title in your post, and if you do, you can ping back here to help your blog get more exposure. To execute a ping back, just copy the URL in the address bar on this post and paste it somewhere in the body of your post. Your link will show up in the comments below. Please ensure that the One-Liner Wednesday you’re pinging back to is this week’s! Otherwise, no one will likely see it but me.
As with Stream of Consciousness Saturday (SoCS), if you see a ping back from someone else in my comment section, click and have a read. It’s bound to be short and sweet.
Unlike SoCS, this is not a prompt so there’s no need to stick to the same “theme.”
The rules that I’ve made for myself (but don’t always follow) for “One-Liner Wednesday” are:
And… this is the hardest word I’ve had to deal with yet. How ironic.
Actually, you know what? If you’re EVER looking for inspiration for something to write on your blog and you have an actual, physical thesaurus (because it’s not going to work with an online one), challenge yourself to write whatever you turn to. Even if you have to close your eyes, open the book and point. Whichever root word your finger lands on, write the first thing that comes into your head. Not good enough? Look at the synonyms! Everything you need to write a post is there.
Like this one – “easy.” The entry for this is full of not only words that mean the same thing, but there are phrases as well. For example: “easy as pie.” How easy is a pie? Have you ever made a pie from scratch? I haven’t. Why? It’s too damned hard! The phrase makes absolutely no sense to me. Or how about “like taking candy from a baby”? That’s not friggin’ easy! It’s cruel! Who the hell wants to take candy from a baby? If nothing else it disturbs the peace!
So what have I learned from this post? From this little exercise? That apparently the easiest thing of all to do today is get me into rant mode. Odd that some of the synonyms further down on the list are serene, tranquil, and untroubled. That’ll teach me to read the whole entry before I start typing next time, won’t it?
I’m doing a little happy dance. There are 26 left-hand pages in my thesaurus; only eleven of them have entries that start with “de.” I chose the eleventh, and so I’m able to combine the two posts (SoCS and A-Z) into one. Was it dexterity that allowed me to pick a good page? Nah. Blind luck.
Nimble-fingered – that’s me of late. With my shoulder problems (it’s now frozen, by the way. I’m waiting to get a call from the hospital to go for a combination ultrasound/steroid shot) I’ve had to learn ambidexterity. I can’t write with my left still, but I’m learning to eat with it. You think you can use your left hand to manoeuvre a fork but if you’re right handed it means you’ve got a knife in your right hand to help your left out. Without the knife, you use your right. Right? Try using your left hand next time you eat something like macaroni. It’s not as easy as it sounds.
I look to try to be dexterous in many aspects of my life. Some of its synonyms are clever, handy, neat and proficient. Proficiency is such a handy skill to have. (Is that redundant?) I attempt always to cut down on the steps it takes to do something. Tidiness depends on it. Never going up the stairs empty-handed is something I strive for.
And with writing too – less is more. Proficiency or dexterity in grammar makes the difference between something that’s easily readable and text that goes on forever, saying nothing or worse, repeating itself.
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