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).

Absolute shit show. After 52 words down, my brain simply melted into a puddle of Q-less goo. The bulk of the words following “quark” were written only after my wife read me a list of Q words. When that proved insufficient, I pulled my dictionary off the shelf and began scanning for fun words, because there was no way in hell I was getting to 128.

Every word that I pulled out of my own brain has a star by it. That’s 65 words, one more than half. You may note several very common Q words without stars on the list; I remind you my brain was in a state of goo.

Have I any regrets? Perhaps not putting “quizzical” as a word separate from “quiz.” It seems like I ought to have.

My oddest difficulty was in coming up with words beginning with the prefix quasi-. Most of the examples I could think of were hyphenated, and it didn’t seem like they were usable for that reason (even as desperate as I was). I found one word where it was not and left it at that.

“Quatloo” is not in your dictionary. It is a fictional currency used in the Star Trek episode “The Gamesters of Triskelion.” I included it because I have no shame. Likewise Quenya is a fictional elvish language created by J.R.R. Tolkien, but I am not ashamed of that, because despite being fictional it is more real than a quatloo.

Don’t mix up your quokkas and your quaggas.

Q is just about the silliest looking letter there is, isn’t it?

This week’s definition from American Heritage Dictionary:

quince (kwĭns)

n.

1. A shrub or small tree (Cydonia oblonga) in the rose family, native to western Asia, having white or pink flowers and hard yellow pear-shaped fruit.

2. The aromatic, many-seeded fruit of this plant, usually used for jelly or in cooked dishes.

[Middle English quynce, pl. of quyn, quince, from Old French cooin, from Latin cotōneum (mālum), quince (fruit), probably variant of cydōnium, from Greek dialectal kudōnion (mālon), alteration (influenced by Kudōniā, Cydonia, an ancient city of northwest Crete) of kodumālon.]