A slightly random post, but let’s face it, words are pretty crucial in our daily lives and given the recent introduction of ‘alternative facts’ to the political landscape, perhaps some of those in the higher echelons of power should choose their words more carefully. But I digress. The Boy recently had a long list of words to learn for English – learn the meaning, learn the spelling, write a sentence using the word. You know the sort of thing. He showed FoTT and me the list and we both admitted to not knowing the meaning of all the words. And that led us to looking the words’ meaning up and subsequently, I have found my personal ‘wow’ word:

The word ‘petrichor’ comes from the Greek ‘petra’ meaning stone and ‘ichor’, the liquid that runs in the veins of gods in Greek mythology. How beautiful is that? There is a load of fascinating science discovered by a couple of Australian scientists in the 1960s, who were studying the smells of wet weather (what a wonderful job that must have been!), but most importantly they coined the term ‘petrichor’. So evocative.

Talking about the beauty of words, one of the Tribe found a magical book called Lost in Translation in her Christmas stocking last year. It’s a compendium of untranslatable words from around the world by Ella Frances Sanders. It makes you realise how many languages have such wonderful words for specific things – words that have no comparative word in English. It’s a lovely book to dip into. Here are a couple of our favourites.

My favourite Welsh word is ‘hwyl’ meaning ‘a stirring feeling of emotional motivation and energy,; I define it as ‘a passion for life’.  Enough said.

(A big thank you to Bishop Wordsworth’s English department – I’m not sure how much the boys enjoy the word lists, but I certainly have!)