Essay Fiction posted May 4, 2024


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Given thought ...

Scrabblelicious

by Tom Horonzy


 
 
First, let me share how this came to be. You see, I was thinking "what I should pen" when the Word of the Day appeared on my monitor screen, introducing dendroglyph in bold letters towards me.
 
 
 I immediately, having been taught Latin in high school, after being an acolyte at mass, took the base of the word - dendro—to mean water, but after being enlightened by its defined definition, I did reconnoiter, for "alas, I was... w r o n g, which is a word difficult for me to speak, as well as it waz for The Fonz to say.
 
 
Well, one thing led an inquiring mind like mine to inquire how any word comes to pass. Furthermore, what would such a word as dendroglyph look like in Mandarin or Nepalese?
And would any sub-Saharan nation use such a word for not having many trees at all?
 
Leaving that thought to be pondered for later, my inquiring mind further queried how humans align words one after the other to make sense and how many words the average person has mulling about in their heads. [Excuse me for a moment; I'll research it and give an answer.]  (pause) 
 
That might have been a mistake, and you can see why by reading what I found in the author's notes, below. I could have posted it here, but it was rather long and somewhat confusing since "word" was synonymously changed to lemma??? Go figure.
 
The condensed answer was 42,000 words, according to research by The National Library of Medicine. I guess they rounded up... or down because my mind thought such a round number to be deniable. On the other hand, if the findings found were published as 41,947 to be the figure, I would have figured it to be accurate. 
 
Okay, does any of this make any sense to you, or is it like a seven-tile draw from a bag of unseen Scrabble letters, being q x j z u a e ?  Postscript - there is no question mark tile!
 
That is why I titled this release Scrabblelicious, a word you cannot find in the dictionary.
 
Therefore, in conclusion, I affirm that my mind created a new word and increased the number of words in my head to 52,311, which is well above the average human's. 
 
Now, I need to go abed. It is very tiring to create something out of nothing. Here today, gone, tomorrow, but for now, let me bid you adieu.
 

 



Revelation Flash writing prompt entry
Writing Prompt
You just discovered that something you thought was true is, in fact, a lie.
It could be a big or small thing, personal or widespread, good news or very bad news, based on real life or imagined.
Tell us what it is and then you could talk about how you found out, the consequences of learning the truth, or anything related to this new-to-you revelation.

Aim for a 500-ish word limit


For now, I wasn't sure if the text was of value to spend member cents promoting it, but if the response is positive to begin, I might go in and add a few.

The picture is my own and denotes a possible feeling you could be having after reading this release as to what this guy is thinking.
What word would you begin a game of Scrabble with the letters q x j z u a e ? Welcome to my Bizaro world.

Additionally, as noted, based on an analysis of the literature and a large-scale crowdsourcing experiment, we estimate that an average 20-year-old native speaker of American English knows 42,000 lemmas and 4,200 non-transparent multiword expressions derived from 11,100-word families. The numbers range from 27,000 lemmas for the lowest 5% to 52,000 for the highest 5%. Between the ages of 20 and 60, the average person learns 6,000 extra lemmas or about one new lemma every 2 days.

Some may question whether this piece meets the stricter sense of the challenge but this was a "flash revelation" that developed after my awakening this morning when I saw the contest posted.
Pays one point and 2 member cents.


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© Copyright 2024. Tom Horonzy All rights reserved.
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