I don’t intend this to sound arrogant but I know lots of words; you do too. Most of us have pretty damn good vocabularies because we read, and we listen to radio and we have jobs and we’re just open to hearing things, right? So while of course there are lots of words I don’t know in all sorts of specialty fields, I was surprised yesterday to see a word I didn’t recognize at all in of all places, a catalogue.

The thing is that catalogues go to lots of people right? And even if the catalogue supports public television (the Signals catalogue, yeah) so maybe you could argue about our intellect and education, still, using words that everyone would recognize would seem to me important for the whole idea of selling stuff to people whom you don’ t know.

In defense of “Signals” however, I will say that the word was not part of a description but rather defined something being sold. What I mean was that the folks who wrote the catalogue item description weren’t responsible for confusing me. See, here’s the thing; the items for sale were six small, like 2 inch high, owl statues. They have little hidden drawers or compartments and they caught my eye. I like owls, though I know little about them and I always remember that my doctor had an owl collection; one that was, I believe sort of thrust upon him (you know the one I mean. Someone gives you an X and the next thing you know, everyone believes you love Xs and for years, everyone gives you an X. Well for Dr. W it was owls.) But I like the idea of hidden compartments and I had a while back bought a teeny tiny toy horned owl at the fabulous toy store, so I started looking at owls. So I’m looking at these little birds, the saw-whet owl and the snowy owl and I stop dead still to see that one of these birds is a flammulated owl.

Okay. All right. I admit it. I had never seen the word “flammulated” in my life. I had no idea what it was, meant and when Stu came home I ran it by him because I just fell madly in love with the word and he reacted sort of the way I expected by sort of saying “the WHA?” Because it just got ot us. And I loved saying it. I don’t know why, but I was in love.

Today I went to Google and typed in “flammulated”. Just as is, not with “owl” attached. Interestingly, I found that the first thing that came up Google-wise was a definition website. After that, it seemed the word did not go around by itself. It was always attached to an owl. So we have a very VERY specific word. I thought that interesting too. And according to “thefreedictionary.com” flammulated means “of a reddish color”. Oddly, the owl box in the catalogue is not reddish and the owl does not appear, as I saw in several photos on several different web sites to be especially reddish. It is a small dark owl with dark eyes, which is apparently unique among owls.

So okay, I’ve now found a hugely tempting website that features dozens of these damn little boxes in animal shapes (NOT owls, surprisingly but oh damn, chimps and hedgehogs and ….) then the website leads to very dangerous things because it’s a massive gift website with dozens of things I like and would like to buy l (and far too much that makes me crazy like angels) but never MIND that now.

Flammulated. I just think it’s a great word and would like to use it more. I don’t have lots of reasons to use a word that means “of a reddish color” especially (as Stu points out, yes my hair could be described as flammulated, especially since I just colored it again) but I just think it should be OUT THERE.

Son of a bitch, that’s just flammulated.

I’ve never seen one so completely flammulated.

It’s flammulated, doc, I’m not sure what we can do at this point.

Once they’ve flammulated, it’s an amazing scene.

Don’t talk to me until after we’ve flammulated.

I can’t explain. I just know it’s love