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I enjoy using prodigious words. Not in an ostentatious way, I hope. But there are times when sentiments cannot be expressed in austere ways.

I have a few favorite ‘prodigious’ words that I use probably more often that I should. But they are my favorites and therefore they circulate in my conversations more than others, because….

Sometimes a mess is not simply a mess, it is a DEBACLE!

Sometimes the way things look are their aesthetics.

Someone who lives in their own little world lives in a microcosm. (that one is REALLY hard to fit into a conversation, but I do try!)

I should give some forewarning that there are some words a person should never attempt to enter into a conversation. I heard one such example for the first time recently and twice within a months’ time, from separate people in fact, it was: doppelganger. I warn you, do not use this word. If you see someone who looked like your friends double then you tell them you saw someone that looked like them, never, I warn you never, tell your friend that they have a doppelganger. If you are female, I would imagine you just lost your best friend, if you are a male I would imagine you are in for a world of hurt.

Also, you should really know what your words mean before you say them, I was using the word ‘masochistic’ wrong for a very long time, which I assure you was embarrassing.

In all seriousness, ‘big’ or ‘prodigious’ words are great. Communication is key to the human experience and the better we communicate the richer our experience will be. Synonyms are not really synonyms at all. Different forms of the same word convey varying degrees of emotion and meaning that we need. Sometimes we do not hate we DESPISE. We may not be in love, but we are enamored.

I would like to use myself in as an example when trying to expel the misnomer that the ability to spout off a big word in conversation conveys some measure of intelligence. Almost every big work I know, I admittedly cannot spell correctly! Most of them I learned from period movies and historical romance novels. I’ve never taken an IQ test, but I assure you my scores would be merely average. And surprise of all surprises I scored better on my GRE’s in math than verbal.

There is no good reason we could not all use a bit of expanding in our vocabulary. I recommend signing up to receive a new word into your e-mail every day for a year. You can do so by subscribing to A.Word. A. Day which is endorsed by the New York Times. You can use this link:

http://wordsmith.org/awad/sub.html

Another option is visiting Save The Words at SaveTheWords.org where I learned that an Agonyclite is "a member of a heretical sect that stood rather than kneeled" and Ficulnean is "worthless information regarding fig-tree wood".