Ink Tea Stone Leaf

Welcome back to my weekly series, Vocab 128, in which I sit down with pen and paper and write 128 words beginning with the same letter, in more or less the order that I think of them, before scanning the page and posting it here. The result is a flex of my vocabulary muscles, an exposure of my handwriting to the world, and perhaps an insight into the psychology of my word associations.

Generally, I avoid words that are merely alternate forms of other words, and when I think of such a word I generally default to the appropriate noun form. Proper nouns I exclude as a rule (but we’ll see how that goes once I get to X).

Considering all of the English words that begin with a voiceless velar plosive, you’d think this would be a slam dunk, but the lion’s share are of course spelled with an initial C. I managed to squeeze out a few compound words and exploit the rich vein of words beginning with KN, but this was still a kognitive (I wish) slog.

I knew I was misspelling “kohlrabi” the minute I finished writing it down, and I don’t know what else to say about that.

The ground rules state that proper nouns are to be avoided, but I have held that this does not include adjectives derived from proper nouns, because adjectives are not nouns. I try not to abuse this loophole, but I indulged myself more this week than with any letter thus far. “Kampuchean” felt the most like cheating, but it’s not.

This was actually the first week I had to appeal to my wife for help, finding myself completely stymied by the time I had scrawled out 126 words. Credit her for “knick-knack” (different word from “knack,” and “knackered” for that matter) and “karma,” a word I absolutely cannot believe I couldn’t come up with.

“Krypton,” of course, is a real chemical element. “Kryptonite” is a fictional substance from Superman comics, now used generally as a metaphor for a powerful entity’s devastating weakness. Different words!

For a moment just now I was beginning to believe that I had completely hallucinated the existence of the word “krall” in English. I have a memory of being a child at the San Diego Wild Animal Park (now known as the Safari Park) and there being at least one area called a “krall,” which I took to be an exotic variant of “corral.” Fortunately, I have a recent-ish map of the Park in my possession, and was able to confirm the existence of a Children’s “Kraal” on the premises. I was wrong about the spelling and also about the precise meaning of the word, but it is current in South African English and that is a kind of English. Count it!

This week’s politically relevant definition from American Heritage Dictionary:

kak·is·toc·ra·cy (kăk′ĭ-stŏkrə-sē, kä′kĭ-)

n. pl. kak·is·toc·ra·cies

Government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens.

[Greek kakistos, worst, superlative of kakos, bad; see CACO- + -CRACY.]