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).

T is going to be the last easy one, for sure. We have passed through one of the richest vocab veins in the lexicon, leaving untold quantities of words where they lay; now we stand before the leanest extremes of the alphabet.

I don’t know about you guys, but I pronounce “then” and “than” differently, and I don’t think they are as hard to differentiate as some people say. It’s worth noting that they share a common etymology, but most people who confuse them regularly wouldn’t even know what that means.

You might be surprised to learn this, but the “toad” in “toadstool” was not originally the froggy creature. It is a respelling of the German “Tod,” which means “death” (don’t eat strange mushrooms).

Remembering that there was a whole suite of TW words was delightful. Too bad I got distracted from it before I could think of “twig,” or “twist,” or “twinkle.”

TH commonly represents two distinct sounds in standard English: the voiced TH of “this,” and the voiceless TH of “thistle.” Funny enough, I neglected to include either of them, even though “thistle” is probably one of my favorite words. Typically, the voiceless TH is more common at the beginning of words (like “think,” “thump,” “thrash,” etc.) or the end of words (like “quoth,” “truth,” “birth,” etc.), while the voiced TH is more common in the middle of words (like “slither,” “bathing,” “loathsome,” etc.). However, the most commonly used initial TH words in English (like “the,” “this,” “that,” “then,” etc.) all have the voiced pronunciation. One of our language’s finest curiosities.

This week’s definition from American Heritage Dictionary:

trek (trĕk)

intr.v. trekked, trek·king, treks

1. To make a slow or arduous journey.

2. To journey on foot, especially to hike through mountainous areas.

3. South African To travel by ox wagon.

n.

1. A journey or leg of a journey, especially when slow or difficult.

2. South African A journey by ox wagon, especially a migration such as that of the Boers from 1835 to 1837.

[Afrikaans, to travel by ox wagon, from Dutch trekken, to travel, from Middle Dutch trecken, to pull.]