Tag: word of the day

Categories
#AtoZchallenge Blogging challenges Christianity teaching Work

F is for ‘future’

*** The following is an excerpt of a newsletter article I wrote for (and about) my new job. ***

 

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future.” Jer. 29:11 NIV

 

What an incredible thought: that there is a plan for each one of our lives. That God designed a plan, specific to each and every one of us, that is perfect. That will prosper us. That will NOT harm us. A plan which was thought up, decided on, and designed into our beings before even one of our days came to pass. And that plan was perfect!

 

The trouble is, we don’t know the plan. In so many ways, we’re just like the little toddler at Mummy’s knee, going where she goes and doing what she does, because we know she knows best. She can see far more, and knows so much better than we do. Just like our Heavenly Father can see perfectly. He knows us, and He knows the future He has planned for us, perfectly.

 

I pray that we all may see God’s hand guiding us in the direction He would have us go. Because His plans are perfect!

 

And have a lovely week!
– KRidwyn

Categories
#AtoZchallenge Blogging challenges Writing

E is for ’embrangle’

So it’s Day 5 of the #AtoZchallenge, where bloggers around the world publish daily during April, based on a consecutive letter of the alphabet, with Sundays off to make up the 26 days.

I’ve chosen ‘Word of the day’ for my 2017 theme, and Day 5 means the letter ‘E’.

There are so many ‘E’ words that I discovered recently: educe; effulge; embay; embrangle; emolliate; emplace; etiolate; evert; excoriate; excorticate; excurse; execrate; exscind; exsect; exsert; exsiccate; extirpate; extravasate.

I mean seriously – how cool are they! Just let me elaborate, elucidate and – maybe? – educate, and enchant…

educe: to draw forth or bring out; elicit; develop

effulge: to shine brilliantly; to send forth (beams of light)

embay: to enclose in or as in a bay; surround

embrangle: to confuse, entangle, perplex

emolliate: to soften. To render effeminate

emplace: to place or position

etiolate: to cause (a plant) to whiten by excluding light; to become blanched or whitened, as when grown without sunlight

evert: to turn outwards, or inside out

excoriate: to strip off or remove the skin from. To flay verbally; denounce; censure

excorticate: to remove the mark, husk, or outer covering from

excurse: to go on an excursion. To digress; wander

execrate: to detest utterly; abhor; abominate. To curse; imprecate evil upon. To utter curses

exscind: to cut out or off

exsect: to cut out

exsert: to thrust out

exsiccate: to dry or remove the moisture from, as a substance. To dry up, as moisture

extirpate: to remove utterly; destroy totally; exterminate; do away with. To pull up by the roots; root up (kinda reminds me of John Davis ‘manuscript’ Frain’s #AtoZchallenge this year!)

extravasate: to force out from the proper vessels, as blood, especially so as to diffuse through the surrounding tissues. [in Geology:  to pour out molten or liquid matter from the earth as lava from a vent, water from a geyser, etc]

So – did I manage it? Did I ’embrangle’ you, dear reader? Or did I effulge? Excurse? Or was it more of an ‘educing’ that I was doing?

And would you use any of these words in your conversations today?

🙂

Have an enchanting one, dear reader!
— KRidwyn

 

Categories
#AtoZchallenge Blogging challenges Christianity Random thoughts teaching Work

C is for ‘clever’

As a mum to three cherubs under 12, and also as a Head of School with over 100 ‘cherubs’ aged 11 to 14, I find myself ‘praising’ kids a lot. It helps, you know? Builds rapport, which in turn assists in ‘training the child they way (s)he should go’ (nod to Proverbs 22;6, if you were wondering).

But I find myself often using the same words. This wearies them – the words, the kids, and also me – and thus forms the topic of today’s post. Synonyms for ‘clever’. If only to keep myself from going stir-crazy!

So. ‘Clever’, according to my handy MacbookPro thesaurus, has four different meanings.

Clever – as in intelligent – could also be: bright, smart, brilliant; talented, gifted, precocious; capable, able, competent, apt, proficient; educated, learned, erudite, academic, bookish, knowledge, wise, sagacious. Also brainy or genius, if we’re being informal.

Clever – as in shrewd – I could use: astute, sharp, acute, quick, sharp-witted, quick-witted; ingenious, resourceful, canny, cunning, crafty, artful, wily, slick, neat. And informally: foxy, or savvy.

Clever – as in skilful – dexterous, adroit (I love this word!), deft, nimble, nimble-fingered, handy, adept; skilled, talented.

Clever – as in witty – quick-witted, amusing, droll, humourous, funny, sparkling, entertaining, scintillating (love this one, too!)

Which one did you like the most? And – here’s the kicker, if you choose to see it as such- will you use it in a compliment to someone today?

[In case you were wondering, this set of 26 ‘A is for’ posts is a part of the global A to Z challenge, where consequential letters of the alphabet are used on an a daily blog posts in April (with Sundays off for good measure). My topic for 2017 is ‘word of the day’. Feel free to tune in tomorrow for ‘D’ 🙂 ]

And until then, here’s me wishing you a scintillating day!

Yours,

KRidwyn

Categories
#AtoZchallenge Blogging challenges momentous events

B is for ‘bissextile’

Go on, guess. What does ‘bissextile’ mean?

And what on Earth is this ‘B is for’ business?

Well, this marks Day 2 of my attempt at the ‘A to Z challenge’ – where bloggers write daily, using consecutive letters of the alphabet, for the month of April (with Sundays off for good behaviour). My theme in 2016 was ‘God’s metaphors’. This year, due to a new job and an insanely crazy-busy last three months, I’ve gone with ‘word for the day’. Easy enough. Yesterday’s word was one I have a pet hate for: A was for ‘always’. And today, perhaps a new word for some of you: bissextile.

So. Did you open up a new tab and google it yet?

My Dad’s the one in the family for discovering new words and researching their etymology (I’m just as likely to look up ‘entomology’, which is really rather different…) and yet I don’t know if he’s aware of this particular word. I’ll have to ask him when he returns from New Zealand in a couple of weeks. Funny, really, because the kids and I are house-sitting for him at the moment, courtesy ex-Tropical Cyclone Debbie which is currently wreaking havoc on the Eastern Australian coast. Thus Hubby is at home, powerless and with no running water (from the taps, that is) while I’m checking out ‘B’ words in his dictionary and blogging at his desk.

Hence ‘B is for bissextile’.

And no, even though it has those three letters in the middle of it which would cause any self-respecting school internet blocking program to flag it – no, it’s NOT about sex.

Actually, ‘bissextile’ is an adjective, which refers to the extra day in a leap year.

How cool is that!

(Oh, and by the way, the ‘sex’ bit is from ‘sextus’, or ‘sixth’, because it was the sixth day before the calends of March. And away we go down another tangent…)

So – have fun working *that* particular word into your next conversation! What a pity I didn’t use this theme last year, which *did* just so happen to include a bissextile day…!

See you tomorrow for ‘C’, dear Reader! And until then, stay safe and be blessed!

— KRidwyn

Categories
#AtoZchallenge Blogging challenges Christianity

A is for ‘always’

So today is April 1st. For many, the day of prankster jokes and general mayhem. For some, the beginning of the April A to Z challenge.

I didn’t officially sign up this year. 2017 has been a hectic, whirlwind few months so far. But today also marks my first ‘real’ day of holidays since my new job started, so here I am, prepared – this morning, at least! – to return to blogging, and to take a second stab at this A to Z challenge which I managed to successfully conquer last year.

And here goes. Day 1 of 26, ‘Word of the Day’.

A – is for ‘Always’

An overused, cliched word. Important in concept, although an impotent tool when thrown at an opponent, in a bid to win the upper hand.

The defeatist, overwhelming, ‘stinky thinking’ a psych nurse once warned me about.

And yet…

also the promise God makes, that He is with us ALWAYS – to the very end of the age – in the very last recorded words of Jesus, before his ascension (Matthew, chapter 28, verse 20, if you’re interested).

So who am I to demonise a word if it’s good enough for my Lord to use?

ALWAYS. A word able to carry the weight of all Christendom’s hopes. Use it sparingly; it’s pretty powerful.

And see you Monday for ‘B’!

Categories
#blog12daysxmas Random thoughts

Tigger vs Rabbit

Today marks the end of my week-long posting series. (It was actually meant to finish yesterday, but I kinda piked out last Thursday due to the Queensland floods.) But anyway, this is the seventh ‘Important Word in my life’, inspired both by the the American Dialect Society’s ‘Word of the Year’ and by @fionawb‘s #blog12daysxmas posts. So, to sum up:

Word 1 was ‘integrity’, Word 2 was ‘restless’, and Word 3, ‘blessed’. I realised that ‘history’ should probably be Word number 4, never having previously comprehended the depth of my emotional attachment to the city of my childhood until it was destroyed in the floods. Word 5 ‘organised’ offset the ‘openly emotional’ of Word 6. And today? The final day? I think it would be remiss of me to not include ‘responsibility’. As in, something which I feel weighs heavily on my shoulders.

I think I’ve always been a responsible person. Maybe it comes of being a middle child. Maybe because I was the girl between two boys. But I can’t ever remember a time when I haven’t felt as though ‘goofing off’ was morally irresponsible. Weird, looking back! Once, I led a devotion at Caloundra Christian College, comparing A.A.Milne‘s characters of Tigger and Rabbit. Tigger, the playful one who bounces through life, oblivious to the damage he causes to others, and Rabbit, the grumpy ‘it must be done properly, in an orderly manner’ one. My point was that as teachers, we shouldn’t force our Rabbit ways on our Tigger students if (as happened in the example I gave) the end result is the same. I was speaking from a wealth of experience. I am far more of a Rabbit than a Tigger. It’s funny, cos Tigger is my favourite of the whole cast of characters! (Maybe it’s true – that opposites attract?) Anyway. I’d say that ‘responsibility’ is an apt choice for my seventh and final word important to me. That reflects the person I think myself to be.

Looking over the list, it seems pretty bleugh. But that may just be my perception. As I mentioned previously, for each character trait I tend to see the negative outweigh the positive. But that’s okay. The list is finished now. So let’s move on to something more fun. More interesting. And I’ll try to present six of them. Momentous events in my life. (That way, I’ll cover that ‘cult’ story I mentioned the other day.)

So… til tomorrow, dear readers – stay safe and well!

Categories
Random thoughts

Of hearts and sleeves

Just thought I’d look up the meaning of that phrase ‘wear your heart on your sleeve’. I mean – I kinda knew it meant ‘to openly display your emotions’, but I just wanted to check. Didn’t know it was from the Bard! But it was used with a negative connotation – the devious Iago, in Othello, planned to fake it.

People say I do this. Wear my heart on my sleeve. For real though, not feigning it! (I think!) Which I guess  can be a good thing. Yes, I’d be hopeless at poker (BlackJack is the game I’m addicted to, anyway – again, another story for another post!) but on the other hand (Tevye‘s singing in my head right now…) I’d like to think that I’m someone that others can trust. That isn’t fake, or so reserved that it’s hard to get to know me.

So the word for today, Day 6 of 7 posts on ‘Important Words in my life”, is ‘open’. And yes, I realise that in yesterday’s post I made mention of bi-polar disorder. Which doesn’t seem to have much at all to do with being ‘open’, except for the fact that I tend to be open about my emotions. And it’s the scope of my emotions that make me sometimes believe that I might have tendencies toward bi-polar. As in, I fit that nursery rhyme down PAT “When she was good, she was very, very good. And when she was bad, she was horrid!” My default position is to vaccillate between being euphoric and hyper-positive about everything (I prefer this state to the other!) and being depressed. I’ve never been officially diagnosed, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if a diagnosis was positive, were I to take the test. Not that it worries me too much. Early in 2009, I spent some time seeing a psychiatric nurse, and the techniques she taught me have helped tremendously, so I am immensely thankful for that!

Anyway, I feel as though I’ve waffled enough for today. And I’d like some sleep in case my boy starts screaming again in a few hours…

Thanks for reading!

 

Categories
Random thoughts

Word Number 5

I’d say that today’s offering is the one word most people use to describe me. Organised. Which can be a good thing – if kept in moderation. If taken to its anal-retentive extremes however, as I admit to sometimes, it can (I’m sure!) be pretty bloody annoying for those around me – especially my poor long-suffering hubby and three kids!

Let’s focus on the positives, though. Being organised can mean that your life, (and others too, don’t forget!) runs more smoothly. At least, that’s what I like to think. And I’m always wanting to be helpful! Hehe.

I mentioned in an earlier post all I was involved in last semester. I ran myself ragged, and lived on adrenalin. (And chocolate!) But I survived, as did my children and (amazingly enough!) my marriage – just – due to my organisational abilities. Which I guess I’m pretty proud of, even though I sometimes dwell on the negative and berate myself for how badly I let things, relationship-wise, slip on the home front.

So yes, I guess any list of seven ‘Important Words in my Life’ probably wouldn’t be complete without including this one. But I guess it’s not something I’m particularly proud of, as this seems (to me, anyway) to be turning into a pretty blah post. Sorry about that.

Anyway, I’m exhausted from a VERY long day, so shall leave this for now and tomorrow regale you with my notions of bi-polar disorder…

Stay safe, dear readers!

Categories
places to visit Random thoughts

The Brissie Kid

I’m the reason my parents moved to Australia. My older brother had been born in a hospital in New Guinea, four years earlier, and I guess they didn’t want a repeat experience. So when they discovered that I was on the way, they relocated to Australia – to Eight Mile Plains in Brisbane, to be precise. Dad found employment as a lecturer in Literacy and Language Development at Mt Gravatt Teachers College, (later to become Griffith University,) and I arrived on the seventh of June, 1974. Six months before the floods devastated the city.

I spent the first nineteen years of my life in that house on Padstow Road, just up the hill from Logan Road, and opposite Multicap Meadows. It got busy during that time, so much so that the B-doubles letting off their airbrakes as they drove past my window lulled me to sleep during my final years there, while I finished Senior at Redeemer Lutheran College in Rochedale and started my B.Ed at Griffith.

I was fortunate to have a bus stop not 100 metres away. With the help of a year-long, go anywhere at any time’ student bus pass, I did the ‘teenage rebellion’ thing and used it lots, spending the majority of my time passing through Garden City on my way into town, to meet friends and hang out, catch a movie, window shop. When at Uni I would bus to my part-time job/s in town, spend time reading novels while sunbaking at South Bank, or (later still) try winning money at the casino. In fact, I was so comfortable travelling by bus, I didn’t get my license until I was 20 – and that, a motorbike license. I then found an even greater sense of freedom on my blue Suzuki GSX250, travelling to UQ at St Lucia to study French in the evenings, during my 4th year of Uni – and the back way, past the Rocklea Markets, became quite a speedway at the almost-10pm mark!

And now to my apology. My prior two posts were… well… more non-events than events. Due to my incredulity at the floods devastating Brisbane again. Quoting my younger brother, who emailed me from London this morning, “I knew those streets. Now they’re gone.” Perhaps this post will go part-way toward an explanation. And that brings me to what I had not realised about myself, but have now…

My important word for today: history. My past, to be specific. I guess what ‘they say’, IS actually true. Your past DOES make you the person you are. So as I stop, and remember, and grieve for what may never be again, I shall also remember  that if my history IS that important to me, then today, right now, and every moment to come, will also be a part of my ‘history’ one day. So I should make the most of it. How about you?

Til tomorrow, dear readers…

Categories
Uncategorized

Sorry.

I’m sorry, dear readers, but my emotions are too raw to write today.

Keep safe.

Ceridwyn