You all know by now that I love words. I love using them. I love knowing them. I love learning new ones. They are my friends.
I was telling Tennessee about how the dog threw up but was fine now because she was waggly. I thought I was making up a silly word to describe the way dogs wag their tails because they’re happy.
But something about the word felt familiar so I searched online to see if it was a real word, because of course I did. It’s the adjective form of the word waggle, which means quick short movements from side to side or up and down. Duh.
I felt a bit silly about not realizing that I already knew that word and that I hadn’t just made it up. It made me wonder. Do I do this often? Use words that feel like they are right without knowing what they really mean?
Naturally, that thought was appalling. One should never use a word if they don’t know what it means. Yes I’m a word snob, I admit that.
But then an even more appalling thought entered my brain. What if this is a new thing? What if it’s a memory issue? After all, I’ll be 55 on my next birthday.
This sent me down a rabbit hole of remembering my father’s fear of losing his mind and then watching it happen at the end of his days. And it was scary for me, facing that fear for myself. Even if only for that short time I allowed myself a mini freakout.
I managed to talk myself down by remembering that it was late, and I was tired, and that there are often so many words floating around in my mind that some are bound to get unmoored from time to time. Y’all just don’t know how chaotic it is inside my head sometimes.
I am not going to live in fear, and it is way too early in my life to be worrying about losing my words. This is what I am choosing to believe so if you think otherwise, please keep it to yourself.
Have a waggly day my friends.
Baby Gay When You're Fat and Gray 
This post makes me very gruntled. I think it’s common to hear an uncommon word once or twice, forget all about it, and then use it and think we are making it up because it just sounds so silly. I think “zoomies” was similar for me. I’m sure I heard it once several years before I had gabby so it went in one ear and out the other (as they say) and then one moment she’s just running around like crazy and then crashes hard with this lovely smile on her face and I said “oh did you get the zoomies?” And my ex asked wtf the zoomies were and I laughed and said “well how else would you describe what just happened?” Thinking of just made it up. I thought I was brilliantly silly until probably a year later an article came across my fb feed in which a vet gave the scientific reason behind why your dog gets the zoomies.
As far as using words you don’t know the meaning of, I thought for the longest time that melancholy meant happy. It’s such a silly word, how could it not? And my parents always taught me “learn what the word is by reading the rest of the sentence” but when the sentence is merely “Anne had a sudden feeling of melancholy.” And the next paragraph moves on to a different character laughing, how am I supposed to deduce that Anne was feeling sad? But luckily it’s not a word I used often so I didn’t make a fool of myself lol
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Zoomies is a great word!
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