Red Room Where the Writers Are

I get the a-word-a-day newsletter from http://www.wordsmith.org. This week their theme was "forgotten positives," which sounds like it could have a whole other meaning besides a grammatical one. The words featured were evitable (as in inevitable), wieldy (as in unwieldy), exorable (as in inexorable), gainly (as in ungainly), and corrigible (as in incorrigible). Some of them surprised me that they were words at all, on their own. And I realized I didn't really know what their meaning was after all, for example, corrigible means "capable of being corrected." It's a good thing I'm corrigible.

There's a hilarious compendium of these words worked into a 1994 essay in the New Yorker, by Jack Winter, which can be found at: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1994/07/25/1994_07_25_082_TNY_CARDS_000367745, and includes sentences like: "There were two ways about it, but the chances that someone as flappable as I would be ept enough to become persona grata or sung hero were slim. I was, after all, something to sneeze at, someone you could easily hold a candle to, someone who usually aroused bridled passion."

I'm so gruntled by all of this.