Sesquipedalian

This photo has nothing at all to do with this post. But I get complaints if there aren't pictures–so here you go, a giant chicken serving beer:
I'm getting stupider. It's true. I've heard this happens as you get older, but I thought I had a good 10-15 years ahead of me before the confusion fog set in (Confusion Fog, incidentally, is also the name of a Meat Puppets song. Huh. I didn't remember that until after I wrote it. This is getting awfully long and full of punctuation for a parenthetical phrase. Dontcha think?). I spent some of my day today re-reading old poetry and my *cough* writing project that I started 2 years ago. Here's the distressing part: There were numerous words in there that I don't know the meanings of anymore. See? I'm getting stupider. Or at least my vocabulary is shrinking alarmingly. So, in an effort to quell the ravages of memory loss and evil word-snitching poltergeists, I am going to begin assaulting you with big words, as I had threatened to do when I first began this blog. The hamsters have come back to roost, buddy! Or some such thing.

Without further ado, here's a tasty lexical tidbit for ya, taken directly from a piece that I wrote about my aged kitty, Keats (rest his fuzzy little soul) many months ago: senectitude. As in, "He is the ruling poster cat of feline senectitude." This one is pretty easy to figure out contextually, especially if you had had the occasion to meet this geriatric kitty in his later years. Senectitude comes from the Latin root senectus, meaning old age, or senex, just meaning old. There you go. I found the word a while ago when I was looking up senescence (biology: loss of the power of cell division) in the dictionary, which I had seen while reading an awesome book about the human genome. Senectitude is just a cool word. It has so much more dignity and grace than “decrepitude” or “infirmity.” And Keats was, occasionally, a bit dignified, even though it was probably due to his waning energy more than any true sophistication on his part.

My other word of the day is dilatory. It just sounds lazy, doesn't it? Lollygagging, laybaout-ing, lackadaisical, leisurely, late all the time, laggard. That's pretty much it. For those of you who want the official version, the OED says that dilatory means: "1. Tending to cause delay; having the purpose of gaining time. 2. Given to or characterized by delay; slow, tardy." I think I really just wanted to highlight this word so that I could tell you that the word immediately following it in the dictionary is "dildo." Dilbert just hasn't made it in there yet; you'll have to keep petitioning...

Oh, and I'm not going to tell you what sesquipedalian means. Those of you who are good friends probably already know because I like it so much, although I don't get much conversational use out of it other than telling people what a cool word it is. Look it up! It's sort of a small joke, really. Ironic, I mean. The first person to correctly identify the meaning of this word (I won't even make you use it in a sentence) gets a little star and a lollipop in the mail. Provided I have your address, of course.