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).

I did my damnedest not to cop out and attach the “un-” prefix to every adjective and verb in the lexicon; I tried to limit myself to such words as were actually commonly used and encountered with that prefix, a standard which was hopelessly arbitrary but kept me filled with the necessary level of anxiety. But when the going got rough, I sustained myself by returning to the well, along with compounds of “up” and “under,” as well as the prefix “uni-.” How odd that it took me so long to come up with “uniform,” though…

Man, “understudy” would have been a good one.

Three quarters of the way through, it struck me that I hadn’t thought of a single (non-mythical) animal that began with U. My wife started reading me a list of such creatures, none of which I could have produced on my own; they are marked with an asterisk on the list. “Urchin” was also on the list and I didn’t think of it until she read it to me, but come on… I know what an urchin is.

I had an existential crisis over the word “ululate.” I simply could not believe that this word had two Ls, but the idea that it began with two Us in a row seemed preposterous. I confess I checked the spelling before I wrote it down.

I pondered long whether “unagi” was sufficiently well known through its presence on sushi menus to be considered an English word (you know, like “sushi” is). AHD does not have an entry for it, but I made an executive decision. Surprisingly, it doesn’t have an entry for “ube” either. I guess this is an area where my favored dictionary is behind the curve.

“Unguent” is a curious word. AHD has the only listed pronunciation with a hard G, and from the spelling it certainly looks like it ought to be a hard G, but I hear it pretty often with a soft G (when I hear it at all). English speakers cannot be contained.

This week’s definition from American Heritage Dictionary:

un·dine (ŭn-dēn, ŭndēn′)

n.

In the occult philosophy of Paracelsus, a being having water as its element.

[New Latin undīna, from Latin unda, wave; see wed-¹ in the Appendix of Indo-European roots.]