Tag: Humor

Sunday Slivers

~ Christine Goodnough ~ 5 Comments

Here are a few of my recent senryu to give you a chuckle as you think of the work week ahead.

free pens
handed out to the crowd
just sign here

brand new product
thirty-day guarantee
same old dotted line

commuter train
buzzing with office gossip
dust swirls in its wake
Gabriella Henderson — Unsplash

Brilliant or Erudite?

~ Christine Goodnough ~ 3 Comments

The Ragtag Daily Prompt this morning is DISTINCTION

Which got me to thinking about the difference in meaning between DIFFERENT and DISTINCT. It’s rather slight: in both cases Merriam-Webster uses the one to define the other.

I then hopped over to goodreads and discovered this quote:

“A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one’s vocabulary and the greater one’s awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one’s thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing.”
― Henry Hazlitt, Thinking as a Science

I was intrigued by, but not totally sold on, this statement. He may be right. On the other hand, I’m sure there are people who are very intelligent who haven’t had much “book learning” and can’t explain “the subtle nuances of meaning” between different and distinct.

Here are two more words that may run parallel, but are not the same and may diverge quite a bit:
ERUDITE: having or showing knowledge that is gained by studying
BRILLIANT: distinguished by unusual mental keenness or alertness

Many times as I’ve been using knitting needles, I thought about the brilliant person who figured out how to wrap yarn around a needle and poke a second needle through, wrap more yarn around it, and actually create a fabric. How many different words did that person know?

What do you think? Is Mr Hazlitt’s statement true, or just an educated man’s understanding of knowledge and thinking?

Lush, Luscious, or Just Drippy?

~ Christine Goodnough ~ 3 Comments

The Ragtag Daily Prompt today is LUSCIOUS

I wrote a nice post once, but hit the wrong button from the choices above and my post disappeared in the twinkling of an eye. Rats!

So again, I chose this prompt word several weeks ago and scheduled my post, but today we’re not thinking of luscious. We had heavy rain in the night, over two inches in the past 24 hours, so the outdoors is very soggy this afternoon. But it was so needed that I think everyone in this area is rejoicing — except maybe the weekend campers. Wouldn’t be nice in a tend having that much rain pouring over your heads.

The sky is still filled with lumpy, long-hanging clouds, but the sky’s getting lighter and we’ll probably have sunshine tomorrow, and the prairie will have a lush green appearance. Farmers will be smiling cheerfully. Awhile ago I heard a little wren singing his heart out from the woods beside us, and robins are perusing the lawn, grabbing whichever end of the worm is sticking out. We might turn up our noses, but to a bird, a worm is a luscious creature. For the worm, however…

Life can be so stressful at the bottom of the pecking order:

parrot-4710730_640
Image by kirillslov at Pixabay