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).

The very first word had to be “no,” the word which practically defines the letter N in English. Naturally I could not just launch myself into all of those various negation words like “nothing,” “nowhere,” etc. I had to space them out.

People with some awareness of American political history may note an apt trio, “nattering,” “nabob,” and “negativism.” Credit Spiro Agnew for this memorable bit of alliteration.

My dictionary doesn’t have “nonogram,” but I do nonogram puzzles all the time and as far as I’m concerned, that is the name of the kind of puzzle this is.

Likewise, my dictionary has “numismatist” but apparently I have misremembered that the field of coin collecting is known as “numismatics.” There doesn’t seem to be room for “numismatism” in this schema, but I can’t be the only person to have stumbled upon this variant and thereby willed it into existence.

I had a hard time coming up with animals for this one, which surprised me. “Nag” can be a term for a horse, I suppose, but the only unambiguous animal here is, I believe, “newt.” Later on I remembered that nuthatches exist, but I am still struggling to think of other animals beginning with N, to be honest.

I may have to concede that “naught” and “nought” are merely variant spellings of the same word and not, as I justified to myself in writing them both down, distinguished by some subtle variation in usage that I simply could not recall in the moment. Let’s say I wrote down “nuthatch” instead.

Honestly, I can’t believe I didn’t come up with “ninja” either. Or “nincompoop.” I love those words.

This week’s definition from American Heritage Dictionary:

nick·name (nĭknām′)

n.

1. A descriptive name added to or replacing the actual name of a person, place, or thing.

2. A familiar or shortened form of a proper name.

tr.v. nick·named, nick·nam·ing, nick·names

1. To give a nickname to.

2. Archaic To call by an incorrect name; misname.

[Middle English neke name, from a neke name, alteration of an eke name : eke, addition (from Old English ēaca; see aug- in the Appendix of Indo-European roots) + name, name; see NAME.]