Writings Not So Hard

Everyday I get an email from Doctor Dictionary with my dictionary.com word of the day. While reading this blog you have no doubt marveled at my remarkable vocabulary. Now you know where it comes from. Well that and the synonym button in Word (incidentally synonym has no synonym, weird). Along with the definitions for the word of the day you’re given example sentences from various works of literature in which said word is used. The sentences always crack me up for some reason. Out of context they are very strange sentences. Lately I started to wonder if there was any sort of theme to the word of the day. How does a word make the cut and are they in anyway related? So I tried to create a story using only the example sentences from the last week or so and my amazing cutting and pasting ability. Here’s what I got (Note: word of the day in bold print):


Such independence of mind was a revelation and an incitement. It promised a counterweight to a supine tendency to follow socially sanctioned practices and ideas. She summed up the long and complex sessions in an hour's extemporaneous speech that was remarkable for its organization, pithiness and coherence. The nitpickers, the whiners, the pettifoggers are everywhere. She was tired of their disapproval, the silent censure, their eagerness always to assume the worst.

In a night of rain, the ruddy reflections of their lights incarnadine the clouds till the entire city appears to be the prey of a monster conflagration. We are living in the time of the parenthesis, a great and yeasty time, he concluded. "Make uncertainty your friend." The Grand Vizier Kuprili of Constantinople, for example, closed the city's coffeehouses. Anyone caught drinking coffee was soundly cudgeled. Egypt, like many countries, was caught up in the eddies of the Great Depression, which overtook Europe and America and which came in Egypt just as the new graduates of the expanded schooling were entering the workforce, looking for the professional opportunities their education had promised.


Quite good wouldn’t you agree? I mean, there is no discernible plot, but still, it sounds like it should make sense. I will admit though that things got a bit out of control once The Grand Vizier of Constantinople broke out his cudgel, but I can’t really think of a better word to describe the Great Depression and its effect on the workforce of Egypt than yeasty.