copse - 2012.01.11





sometimes, i will encounter a word that i seldom see, and it will get me all excited.

i remember being in highschool and college and encountering such beautiful words as "pustular", "chaos", "anathema", "epiphany", "putrid" and "evanescent" and my reaction was, oh my god i have got to use those in a sentence.  (i can almost see my teachers scratch their heads and grimace at the badly contrived sentences and essays that i wrote: try using "methuselah" in an essay).

i'm geeky like that: words get me excited and my books are some of my most prized possessions.  i'm that guy who's sniffing the pages of a newly bought book, and i can get worked up about finding out how to cover a book without using any adhesive.

i digress.

one of the many words that stuck in my head was the word "copse".  when i first read it, i thought, "typo, bad proofreader!"

i looked it up (because somehow "as he made his way through the field, the sun peeked from behind a small corpse to his left" did not quite make sense).

lo and behold:

copse. noun. [kops] a thicket of small trees or bushes; a small wood.

yep, my reaction: ohmygoditsactuallyawordihavegottousethatinasentence!

(notice how when you're excited, and you try to think, you think too fast and forget to pause a bit to help your brain catch up?)

years later, i read much less now (but yes i do miss it) and every now and then i still encounter a word that gets me excited.  sometimes, i'm lucky enough to encounter a picture of the word that got me excited.

as i was going on a photowalk (see entry about barney and the aliens), i came a cross an empty field and there it was.

lo and behold, a copse.

yep, my reaction: ohdearalmightygodihavegottotakeapictureofitanduseitinasentence!

...as he made his way through the field, the sun peeked furtively from the horizon, left of a small copse which, though ordinary, inexplicably caught his eye and sang deep to a trove of memories long since buried and thought forgotten.
ah, bliss.

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