2013 exercise #1
in Margaret Atwood's short story "Weight" (Wilderness Tips / Bantam Books / 1993), the speaker and her best friend, Molly, have a running joke where they take words that are meant to describe women negatively and come up with benign meanings for them. some examples (with some altered wordings) are:
strident a brand of medicated toothpick used in the treatment of gum disease.
shrill as in the Greater Shrill--a sharp-beaked shorebird.
paranoid a wide-angled camera for taking snap shots of the bizarre.
dismemberment the conscious act of forgetting.
come up with 3-5 words that you feel need re-definition. re-define them and use them in a sentence. (please try to veer away from using the original word meaning... as you can see, word root meanings are much more interesting.)
strident a brand of medicated toothpick used in the treatment of gum disease.
shrill as in the Greater Shrill--a sharp-beaked shorebird.
paranoid a wide-angled camera for taking snap shots of the bizarre.
dismemberment the conscious act of forgetting.
come up with 3-5 words that you feel need re-definition. re-define them and use them in a sentence. (please try to veer away from using the original word meaning... as you can see, word root meanings are much more interesting.)