February 4
- A loving, lovely life partner
- Our betta fish, Moonlight. (RIP)
- Friends who drive long distances to hang out
Rangent: when you go on a rant that is tangential to what you are actually discussing. Here comes a rangent.
In trying to find words that describe someone who has chosen to spend and share their life with you, who has grown life inside them, who has called 911 when you were unable, who genuinely wants the best for you, you often find restrictions. Words of that nature are not easy to come by in the English language.
In using the term lovely, I didn’t want their to be a mainly “visual beauty” focus. For to me, she is truly, unbelievably beautiful on the outside. And the term “inner beauty” could probably work. But it doesn’t roll off the tongue; it sounds…forced?
So I turned to the dictionary for guidance:
love·ly
/ˈləvlē/
adjective
- exquistely beautiful.
Okay…so we are back at beautiful. Do tell, dear dictionary, the tale of the word “beautiful”.
beau·ti·ful
/’byōōdəfəl/
adjective
- pleasing the senses or mind aesthetically.
Okay…what do you mean by “aesthetically”?
aes·thet·ic
/esˈTHedik/
adjective
- concerned with beauty or the appreciation of beauty.
Ahem. What?
I went to grade school. And one of the “RULES” of definitions that was ground into me was that you cannot define a word with itself. And while this doesn’t *literally* do that…c’mon!
Beautiful = Aesthetically pleasing
Aesthetic = Concerned with beauty
Gah. //end rangent