To explicate...yes, I know I could have used "explain" but I wanted a word with the first syllable accented.

You see, I have this love for words. Unusual, bountiful, multilayered words have been my friends for years.

But I've not worked in, nor lived in, an environment where I could use many of the wonderful words living in my head.

As an elementary teacher, I found myself translating constantly from my own vocabulary and sentence structure into the vocabulary level of the students. Though I steadfastly refused to surrender to their sentence structure and grammar, I greatly simplified my own to approach the students' vernacular.

And as a bus driver, my vocabulary choices were similarly limited, both in communication with my peers and with my passengers. Not to mention school personnel, whose erudition tends to be pretty minimal, even with the bachelor's degree.

In my current employment, I often use polysyllabic words, but still I'm restricted by the limits of my hearers' or readers' experience. Once in a great while I find a gem--a person whose background is in liberal arts and who loves the spoken and written word as much as I.

It's almost like a secret society of word lovers. Someone who gets the literary allusions and can bandy quotations and polysyllabic abstruse vocabulary with me. What a joy!

One of the many reasons I miss Batty, by the way.

Home? Conversation restricted to paying bills and describing ailments. What a drag.... Any other attempts at conversation are met with professorial pronouncements of the way it is. Definitely a conversation-killer.

So I started here with excrement and excellent, accent on the first syllable, and I've been playing with them all month. I suspect I may run out of such words before we run out of November days. Or I may go read a dictionary.