Words.
Of all lengths, configurations, languages, and pertaining to all kinds of diction.
I’ve been described as a verbivore, logophile, logomaniac, bibliophage, logastellus; the list could witter on. Howbeit, I am content with cognominating myself a word lover. My love for words sprawls beyond their semantics and phonaesthetics.
Ruinously drawn to the intricacy with which letters are spun together to beget a sundry of words with unalike nuances, in awe of how lone sounds of letters concatenate to spawn sounds of byzantine complexity, I am guilty of epeolatry. The tenors of mizpah and hiraeth enthrall me; the way the silent h of silhouette rolls off the tongue like butter off a hot knife, and olo is utterly spurned while saying colonel transfix me, yet it is the words themselves that are of paramount rapture to me.
Words embody within themselves a sea of erudition. A brief cogitation of their etymology unearths that buried sapience. Reckon the Sankrit word atman meaning soul, assimilated in the sobriquet Mahatma (great soul) given to Gandhi; maha is also rooted in Latin as magnus extrapolating which the English adjective magnanimous can be parsed as the Latin basis of mahatma. Or the Latin word sagitta meaning arrow which finds itself in the botanical genus Sagittaria (arrow-shaped leaves) and also in Sagittarius(Archer); deem the sagittal plane, so pivotal in medical imaging, as an arrow slicing the body.
An avid bibliophile, voyaging from the puerile Redwall books to the piquant Pygmalion and the riveting Lolita, I have amassed a repertoire of words- zowzy, recalcitrant, ameliorate, the list continues. Born in an Oriya menage, bred in a Hindi speaking commune, perusing Sanskrit for years, hearkening Urdu songs, I was inundated with cant of myriad ancestry. Add to that my immersion in Latin and my penchant for collecting words, like souvenirs, from all languages, be it Japanese (Kouyou) or Portuguese(Saudade), the coda is a vast lexicon I use to flummox my peers.