Posted in Thought Life
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hey, interj. sound made to attract attention, to express surprise or other feeling, or to ask a question. --Thorndike--Barnhart High School Dictionary, 1968. Look at the date of my last entry: more than a month ago. I have been blogging on my other blog pretty regularly, but this one, which my family calls my "thinking" blog, has been neglected. Perhaps I've done no "thinking" of note... I was watching the Schoolhouse Rock dvd with my grandkids the other day. Do you know it? This is the one we watched over-and-over: Interjections show excitement or emotion. They're generally set apart from a sentence by an exclamation point! or by a comma when the feeling's not as strong. I've been thinking about the word *hey,* which led me to look it up in my old-school dictionary. You see where it says it is used to "attract attention, express surprise or other feeling, or to ask a question." What a multi-purpose word! I sort of wondered if it came from the word "Ahoy!" which is also used to attract attention. You could probably also use the word Ahoy to "express surprise," as in, Ahoy! What have we here? Or is that "asking a question?" And am I way off base thinking that Hey and Ahoy might be related? As usual, when I look up a word in the dictionary, I wander. While getting to the right page, I find a word or two among the guide words (the beginning and end words at the top of the page, if you, like me, have forgotten the term) that I have never seen. This morning I found "fricative" (in phonetics, pronounced by forcing the breath through a narrow opening formed by placing the tongue or lips near or against the palate, teeth, etc...f, v, s, and z are fricative consonants." Also, "gibingly" (the adverb form of "gibe"). I also noticed, in my dictionary wanderings today, that "hi" was not included as an entry. However, the word "high" had a total of fourteen different meanings. I knew all of them except number 12: slightly tainted, as in Game is often eaten after it has become high. Of course, I love number 14: excited by alcoholic drinks (or drugs: he's high.) All of this has, of course, no real meaning at all. I just wanted to say Hey. |
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Posted by Anonymous