My favourite words don’t have especially fantastic deep and meaningful reasons behind them. I just like the way they feel in my mouth.
Versipellis – It means werewolf in latin. Well, actually it means skin-changer I think but it was easily the most exciting word that the beloved Cambridge Latin Course ever taught me. It’s also the one latin word that I am guaranteed never to forget. It’s not exceptionally useful. Once I could translate parts of Catullus, now I know what to translate as werewolf.
Dude – This is the word that I have gifted to an autistic child with echolalia’s vocabulary. Before he started using it I hadn’t realised I said it as often as I do, but I really like it and that’s a definite hangover from being born in the 80s and watching a lot of 90s TV and film. Cowabunga Dudes.
Yellow – There is a term, somewhere in the English language which means a filler word. In usual English this tends to be ‘Well’, in Japanese it’s ‘Ehto’, in Mish it’s ‘Yellow’ or ‘Lemons’ or ‘Meep’ or very occaisionally ‘Arkle’, but my favourite of all is Yellow. It sounds really nice, it sounds like ‘Cellar Door’ is supposed to when it’s explained in Donnie Darko and it feels really nice when you move your mouth to say it.
I’m not convinced that favourite words was a particularly great blog prompt for me.
Oh – if Japanese schoolchildren ever ask what your favourite words are then they probably mean to ask what your favourite aphorism is.