My Love of Words
If there is one thing I love, it is words: I love their sounds, their meanings, their double and triple meanings, and their etymology, which is just a classy way of saying “their derivation!” But I have discovered the word that describes me: logophile, from the Greek logos meaning “speech”, and the ending – phile meaning friend or lover. I don’t know that I’d go quite as far as to claim “epeolatry”, the worship of words, first coined by American Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1860. Literarian? … an educated or lettered person? … maybe. I hope I usually give an opinion only on things I know about, rather than be accused of ultracrepidarianism! And yes, I love books, am therefore a bibliophile, but not necessarily book-bosomed, because I don’t carry a book at all times. Am I a bibliobibuli? Mary would need to answer whether I read too much. Reading a few books at a time, as I sometimes do, would render me a bibliophagist! But I’m sure I am not the only one who is bibliosmiac – surely the