Okay, so readers of the BBC online submitted their favourite (BBC's spelling, of course) words and the BBC published 50 of them with some comments here. Some of the comments are pretty interesting. I love word-association-thinking and lists of words. It's often the creative jolt I need to get my brain seeing things differently, and as language is a shared experience, words often take me to images that will be surprising, but somehow shared, as well.
The first word on the list was Defenestrate, which means "the action of throwing something or someone out of a window." The first thing I remembered was an experience I had in 9th grade. Forgive me the indulgence, but I'll share it here.
I was in math class, and we were going through a homework assignment, which I did notoriously poor on. After grading our own work by switching papers with a peer, our teacher surprised us by asking that we turn it in. Well, like I said, I didn't perform too well on the homework, which is why I crumpled it up and threw it out the window. Despite the logic of my actions, my teacher didn't believe me when I said I didn't have any work to turn in. I was taken out to the hall because our discussion got a little heated... finally I had to confess, with embarrassment, the reason I couldn't turn anything in, and to prove the validity of my confession, he made me produce the evidence. I found my homework on the lawn next to scholl and did my best to iron it out on my way back to my second-story classroom. In the end, he chuckled a bit, and we were a little more friendly towards each other after that. Perhaps he had his own defenestration history. If only I'd known that word back then, I could have really impressed him.
