Category Archives: A words

Alight

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter A

Alight: (v) descend from the air and settle: e.g. a lovely blue swallow alighted on the branch

It’s really outdated. Matter of fact, if you used the term today it would have to be a comical retro reference to a former time.

“Heavy.”

I don’t know why we considered that word cool. I guess we thought it communicated that some concept was deep, containing a weight of wisdom.

It certainly would not go over in this day and age, where we think profundities are achieved by explaining on Facebook or in a Tweet how we plan to go to the grocery store to pick up a can of pimentos. (LOL)

And honestly, even in the era when “heavy” was considered to be contemporary, many of the ideas being passed along were purposely obtuse, in order to appear to be intellectual.

Here’s what I know: really great ideas and powerful words of encouragement and joyful exhortation … alight.

  • They land on the soul effortlessly, with a bit of jubilation and simplicity.
  • They encourage us to exhale as we appear to be holding our breath in anxiety.
  • They suggest the possibility of a solution in what seems to be a terminally dismal cave.
  • They cause us to giggle instead of sitting around envisioning scenarios of doom

Wisdom is brief, it is easy, it is non-burdensome and it is evidence that we are not alone.

Some people feel extraordinarily astute by complicating living situations, offering a climate of ferocious debate which establishes them as brilliant and insightful, but I have found that true spirituality, divine emotion, ordained intelligence and great movement is best when it alights in our being, weightless but worthy.

Heavy just makes us sag at the shoulders under the oppression.

We need a generation of intelligent people who can have the wisdom of the serpent … but alight as harmless as doves.

 

Alienate

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter A

Alienate:(v) cause someone to feel isolated or estranged: e.g. an urban environment that would alienate its inhabitants

Some words are symbiotic twins. (Are the words “symbiotic” and “twins” redundant? I’ll have to look that up.) Anyway, they work together to create a good or to create the potential for evil.

You will never need to alienate another human being as long as you’re willing to confront the mediocre in your life.

For instance, if you run across people who are better than you at some task, rather than trying to attack their acumen, you evolve and learn from them. If you accept the mediocre in your life, it becomes necessary to foster a disgruntled attitude and discover something unseemly about your competition.

All prejudice is grounded in a sense of mediocrity. I will tell you, if the white people in the South prior to the Civil War had raised offspring who could work the fields, toiling with the same diligence as the Africans, they wouldn’t have felt the need to alienate the hostages as inferior, but instead, would have joined them, shoulder to shoulder, pursuing their cotton-picking minds.

I know when I start becoming critical of others, it is a warning sign that I’ve accepted mediocre behavior, and because some strangers have dared to be superior to me, I begin to find fault and separate them from my field of play and stable of friends.

We do it in politics. We certainly do it in religion. We do it in corporations, by trying to spread rumors about another company’s hiring practices instead of allowing for the product itself to find place in the market.

Mediocre and alienate are twins.

If you are alienating somebody from your life right now, it’s because you’ve accepted some sort of mediocre attitude as normal. And if you’re mediocre, you will eventually need to alienate people who dare to excel.

It’s why in the United States it is more popular to talk about our uniqueness than it is to review our plans and critique our progress. When the stats and facts about our world placement in education, health care and even personal relationships is measured against other countries, we are not always found at the top. So this demands that we alienate. Some of our favorite terms:

  • third world
  • backward
  • non-Democratic
  • and ignorant

Great people don’t have to criticize anyone. They just evolve towards the new understanding instead of staying entrenched in tradition.

When you get rid of mediocre, you no longer feel the need to alienate other people. When you’re alienating people, it’s always a sign of some mediocre part of you trying to justify … blah.

 

Alien

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter A

Alien: (adj.) belonging to a foreign country or nation

People are funny. (But it is a good idea not to laugh at them to their face.)

What I mean is, the boundaries we establish for personal contact and acceptability within the human race are not only bizarre, but always prove to be irrelevant.

Even though people from Africa didn’t decide to emigrate to the United States, but instead were brought over on a “Kidnap Carnival Cruise,” complete with chains and beatings, we still decided to insult them while they picked our cotton by continuing the mistreatment and relegating them to less-than-human status.

We did the same thing with the Chinese when we were building the railroad. We welcomed them to the country so they could lay our tracks, work cheap and receive a good old-fashioned American dose of abuse.

Matter of fact, every nationality which has come to this land has gone through a season of being rejected as tourists, beaten up as neighbors and eventually absorbed due to the passage of time and proving their usefulness to our general welfare.

I think what some Americans would like is to have the Mexicans come in, clean the houses, work the menial jobs, pick the fruit and lettuce–and then somehow or another, be transported back to their homes in Mexico nightly, so as not to interfere with our present “preferred mix.”

Yes, if the Southern plantation owners could have had the black folks pick cotton by day, and then jam them into a space ship to go back to the Dark Continent to sleep at night–only to return at dawn to work, we would have called that the Great American Ideal.

But doggone it, those foreigners who come here and work for us for pennies on the dollar start desiring things like citizenship, consideration and worst of all, equality.

I learned a long time ago in that what betrays me more than anything else are my needs that vary from my wants.

  • America needs cheap labor and souls who have been raised in a culture with a great work ethic.
  • The fact that we don’t want them to live next door to us creates the conflict.

So I guess the only choice is to either lessen our need or change our wants.

Yes … that will truly be an alien concept to us all.

 

Alibi

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter A

Alibi: (n) a claim or a piece of evidence that someone was elsewhere when a criminal act is alleged to have taken place.

I think I have only talked to a policeman about four or five different times in my life. Isn’t that weird?

I have avoided these encounters because quite bluntly, I don’t like them. It’s not personal, or a disrespect for the profession. It’s more the realization that putting oneself in jeopardy of being questioned or challenged is a great way to eventually fall off the cliff, onto the rocks of stupidity.

On those few occasions when I have been stopped by a policeman for a traffic violation, or to ask me if I’ve seen something on the road as I’ve traveled, my profile is always simple: don’t talk too much. Limit answers to less than eight words and make the policeman draw out the information instead of fumbling around, trying to come up with an alibi to display how it would be impossible for me to have been a participant in anything gone awry.

Here’s the truth: the more we speak, the guiltier we become.

You see this watching any cop show or movie. If a suspect is glib, full of unrequired information, you pretty well assume he’s the culprit.

So even though I have never hurt or killed anyone, if I was questioned on the subject, I would not be in any hurry to establish my alibi or explain my whereabouts, nor seem surprised that the inquiry was being made in the frist place.

I remember the first time I heard the spiritual sung, “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?”

After the musical question was posed for the first time, I simply stopped singing and said … “No.”

Algebra

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter A

Algebra: (n) the part of mathematics in which letters and other general symbols are used to represent numbers and quantities in formulas and equations.

X marks the spot.

Actually, it marks the spot where I crinkled my brow and totally ceased to understand mathematics.

My high school algebra teacher was a recent immigrant from Japan who had a mastery of numbers and a limited capacity for language. He created a double whammy–I was trying to learn something that was Greek to me, with a Japanese accent.

On top of that, it was his first teaching position, having just graduated from The Ohio State University, and although he was eager to be an instructor, he was less than versed in some of the more humane possibilities.

So after he tried to explain algebra to me for the fourth time, he became frustrated and started to curse. It was in Japanese, but I will tell you that swearing has the same intensity in every langauge.

I don’t know what it was about algebra. For some reason, I was granted a B in the subject, even though I have no concept about the process whatsoever.

Imagine my glee when the next year I discovered that I would be taking Algebra II. It was very similar to the sensation of, “even though I’ve never been on a date, here is the woman I am going to marry.”

Honestly, I have never used algebra in my whole life. Perhaps I could have put it to some practical purpose, but that would have required that I understand its value, in order to know what purpose would have been practical.

Candidly, I toil under the concept of eduction. What I mean is, I do believe there are things we are taught which may not have any immediate value to our lives, but still have an esoteric importance.

Flatly, they make us seem civilized.

So I’m happy to report that I actually survived a semester of algebra, and Algebra II, and then ran out of the room in horror at the mere mention of calculus.

So for me: X=the 24th letter of the alphabet.

 

Al fresco

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter A

Al fresco: (adj) in the open air: e.g. an al fresco luncheon.

Much as I enjoy the arrival of spring with the promise of coming summer, and the warmth of that experience, I also become fully aware that I am about to be inundated by many different individuals who want to take advantage of the beauty of the season … to do everything outside.

Especially difficult for me is when they suggest that I take my sound equipment and music and array it on some sort of makeshift flat-bed trailer to perform in a park situation, surrounded by so many distractions that it’s nearly impossible to get the attention of a dead squirrel.

Let me tell you what bothers me about it:

1. Good sound needs walls. Otherwise it floats out and joins with other distracting molecules and becomes distorted or dispelled.

2. Even though I work very hard to be interesting, birds and trees, supersonic jets flying overhead and children briskly running and tripping to fall and scrape their noses do tend the eliminate the possibility of an ongoing attention span.

3. Bugs. If you are a normal person who showers, uses deodorant, or God forbid, aftershave, bugs seem to approach you as if you were a saloon and they are determined to get drunk on your elixir. I’ve had them fly in my mouth, buzz my bald head and perch themselves inside my ear.

I think I’ve just described the definition of “distracting.”

It happened to me recently when some friends invited me out to dinner, and asked if I wanted to sit at a table near the lake. It was a beautiful evening, about 6:15 P.M., and apparently the exact time when the local bees come out for an evening fellowship and what appeared to be church service. They huddled together, gathering around our food, and at times it appeared they were saying grace for the bounty set before them.

We eventually (being more intelligent than the buzzers) found ways to cover up our food, our bodies and the surrounding table with napkins, plates–and I think one lady used a scarf. It was not exactly what I would call a favorable dining experience.

I think going camping is an al fresco event. When you do so, you plan on roughing it, taking on nature and trying to get away from the delicacies of life.

But every other time you go al fresco, you must realize that it’s going to turn out to be a campout–and as soon as you arrive outside, you have departed your home … and entered Nature’s back yard. 

Alfredo

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter A

Alfredo: (n) a sauce for pasta incorporating butter, cream garlic and Parmesan cheese.

There are very few surprises.

Well, I guess the fact that avocados are high in calories is a little alarming, considering how little taste they offer for the load. But generally speaking, you can taste–or really just look–at a dish of food and know that it is killer with everything that produces the fat and sugars which make us bounce out of the room in our “rotundness.”

Such is alfredo sauce.

It’s almost comical, isn’t it? It seems to me that the times in my life that I’ve eaten fettuccine alfredo, I have found myself screaming at the world around me, “What the hell! Leave me alone! I’m gonna go out with a fork in my hand and a smile on my face!”

  • Butter. Come on. Can anything be more symbolic of excess?
  • Cream.
  • Parmesan cheese.
  • And then, on top of that, to create a noodle that is larger and wider than spaghetti–a four-lane carb–to make sure you don’t lose one single drop of this exorbitantly-caloried sauce, is a proclamation of insanity portrayed as a declaration of eating independence.

I once walked by a plate of fettuccine alfredo–without consuming it, merely viewing it–and went to the scale, having gained three pounds. My eyeballs had absorbed the richness through visual osmosis.

It’s much like America. Watching a little piece of Dr. Oz the other day as they were discussing how to take kale and turn it into chips by baking it in the oven, a commercial came on afterwards advertising the new Wendy’s double-bacon, avocado, guacamole cheddar cheese burger.

I love this country. We talk such a good game–and then we decide never to play it.

We think putting on public service announcements about childhood obesity will cover the problem as we continue to dangle saturated fats and sugary confections in front of our children like Christmas ornaments lit up by tiny little bulbs.

They tell me people in Italy eat lots of pasta, and don’t have heart trouble. All I know is, if they’re eating fettuccine alfredo, they should be prepared … well, they should be prepared … to die.

Alfalfa

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter A

Alfalfa: (n) a legume with clover-like leaves and bluish flowers, native to southwestern Asia; it is widely grown for fodder.

It’s really quite amazing.

I will never be able to consider alfalfa a legume grown for fodder. Instead, the fodder of alfalfa, to me, is a scrawny white boy with painted-on freckles, black hair parted in the middle, with a huge cow-lick sticking up in the back.

Yes, I’m talking about the young man who was the hero, sometime-villain, and always dopey foil of every ill-conceived plan from the cartoon, The Little Rascals.

Recently, during a particularly satisfying episode of channel-surfing, I stumbled on one of these grainy black-and-white productions done in the 1930’s and 40’s. I decided to watch.

It surprised me that as a young kid I would have been drawn to this adventure series. First of all, we don’t need to discuss how television negatively affects children today, when back then we sat them down in front of the box to watch The Little Rascals.

They were a nasty and cantankerous group of children, who did their best to perform evil pranks on their adversaries and promoted the bigotry of the day with a wide-eyed, purposely dumbed-down black child named Buckwheat.

Alfalfa was especially annoying to me. But I realized he was the exact representation of what makes America so mediocre.

  • He wasn’t as attractive as he thought he was.
  • He wasn’t the leader he thought he was.
  • He wasn’t as successful as he thought he was.
  • And just like so many of these musical shows on TV today, he couldn’t sing as well as he thought he could.

I kept waiting for something redeemable to come out of the escapade–some sort of Aesop moral which a young child could take away from the television set and proudly say, “There. I learned something positive today.”

It just wasn’t there.

Matter of fact, if some of the deeds of The Little Rascals were taken to juvenile court, they would definitely be spending some time behind bars, eating chicken pot pies.

So the word “alfalfa” is perhaps ruined for me forever because it represents a bratty, snotty, untalented young boy who thinks too highly of himself.

So please forgive me for failing to recognize the agricultural possibilities. Yes, I guess alfalfa is supposed to be a legume.

But on The Little Rascals … he was a fruitcake.

Ale

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter A

Ale: (n) a type of beer with a bitter flavor and higher alcoholic content

There are three important words that must be understood, otherwise each one of us teeters on the verge of falling over the cliff into the great abyss of obnoxious.

If you don’t know the difference among these words, you will start using them interchangeably, which renders you ineffective and nearly inert.

  • Prejudice
  • Opinion
  • Insight

When I looked at today’s word from the dictionary, I realized that nearly everything I would write on this subject was not only irrelevant, but certainly should be cast into the great vat of useless.

I don’t drink beer. So since ale is stronger, it hasn’t passed my lips. Therefore, for me to pontificate on this subject would not only be ridiculous, but harmful to the general good of those ale-drinkers  who are much wiser in their tastes than me, and who would be willing to offer insight instead of producing opinion and prejudice.

I have often told people that my one and only experience with beer led me to believe that it tasted like what I thought fly spray would be like if I was stupid enough to ingest it.

I am weird. I don’t like to put things in my mouth that don’t taste good–which normally, to me, is sweet or salty–just to prove that I have the kind of buds located in my tongue that are versatile and universal.

Mine is not a moral objection; mine has no social implication. Beer and ale just taste like beer and ale to me, which honestly, leaves me ailing.

So please forgive my lack of contribution to this topic. What I tried to do was avoid opinion and prejudice as much as possible, while admitting my lack of insight.

Now if we could just get people in academia, pulpit and government to do the same, we might arrive at our ignorance much more quickly … and alleviate it through education and experience. 

Aldrin, Buzz

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter A

Aldrin, Buzz: (1930- ) U.S. Astronaut who walked in space for 5 hours and 37 minutes during the 1966 Gemini 12 mission. In 1969 he took part in the first moon landing, becoming the second person, after Neil Armstrong, to set foot on the moon.

Perhaps he acquired his nickname because he was selected to play a bee in the second-grade play, Spring is Sprung, personifying the emergence of Nature for another year.

Yes, maybe that’s why they call him “Buzz.”

Or maybe it’s because he has a penchant for snoring and the sound that emotes from his nostrils is best described as a “buzz.”

Then I had a thought that he got this name, Buzz, because of the haircut he sported, which at one time or another, has been referred to as a “buzz cut.”

Maybe he was just the kind of guy who liked to drive around town waving at people, making it known that he had a car and could afford gasoline–just “buzzing about.”

I was thinking that when he was a young boy doing pranks, he might have been one of those kids who rang people’s doorbell, and then disappeared quickly–a “buzzer.”

Another idea: maybe he played basketball and was known for making the winning goal just before the clock ran out, “beating the buzzer.”

I’m not sure how he got the name Buzz.

Maybe it’s because he buzzed around the moon and stopped off to take a brief stroll before heading back home.