You need this word, part 4

We have nouns, single words, for things getting better:  improvement, advance. But I don't know a lone word--not an expression, not an idiom--for things getting worse, especially when the worsening is a result of making a so-called improvement, and I think we need one. I propose  d e p r o v e m e n t for the noun, d e p r o v e for the verb.

For example, I just reluctantly installed Windows 10 in my PC. I gave in because many of the programs I use were getting interrupted, which is to say disrupted. Then Microsot would inform me (rather snottily, I thought) that these programs were no longer compatible with whatever, and that my problems would be solved if I would only accept the Dark Side. I didn't and don't want most of the new features; I'm not fond of getting tracked, and I would gladly sacrifice ease to keep privacy. Well, Windows 10 is in, and I don't like it. I can't set up the appearance that I prefer, all sorts of things keep popping up when I'm trying to do the task I sat down to do, and MS keeps shouldering in with programs and pages that I don't want. For me, it's a solid deprovement.

You need this word, part 3

 

 

You know when you go into the kitchen to get something, and you forget what it is? and you have to go back through the doorway, maybe even back to the point in the house where you started, before you recall what you were going after? and when you get into the kitchen again, you forget it again, except maybe this time you keep going in a particular direction, opening the refrigerator door, or a cupboard door, and you stare like a stoner, and you really don't know what you are looking for, and finally on the third try, by repeating to yourself silently or out loud what the thing is, you achieve the kitchen and you still know what it was, and it was vaguely in the direction you were going but not in the refrigerator nor in that particular cupboard? The word for that is Kitchenheimer's.

You need this word, part 2. Also many cool shoes.

The next needed word comes from someone, also in Doug Powell's workshop, who apparently had not been paying attention to the sound or sight of words in his many years, and who pronounced a word to be "sartori." But, it is a good new word, s a r t o r i, useful for the many of us who fret over dressing properly for some--for any--social situation, from going to the market to, oh, attending a writing conference. I define it as the state of bliss, the state of freedom from desire, induced by knowing that you have chosen precisely the right clothing for the situation.

Also, has anyone else ever noticed that, however oddly or idiosyncratically writers may dress, they always have *really* cool shoes?

You need this word, part 1

At last summer's Napa Valley Writers Conference, I had the grace to choose Doug Powell's workshop. Doug always presents wrapped in flannel and knitted vests, with a tractor cap jammed down on his skull. He may run cold, but his seminar was hot. I still cannot encompass how marvelously he got back to the roots of writing. One of his exercises was to write one-word poems. Go ahead. You think about what makes a poem, and how to pack that into one evocative word. Another was to create a new word, a word that we need but that does not exist in English. I am still sorting these out.

I propose a new word:  t o n e d e f t . It means the opposite of "tone-deaf;" that is, the quality of using precisely the right word, or words, for the situation and the task. For instance, "D.A. Powell is tonedeft."