Captivating

According to the most recent Facebook quiz I've taken, the meaning of my name is "captivating".

Now, you should know up front: I am a geekiest of word geeks. It explains a lot about me and who I am in general and also in some very particular and unusual ways. I love words. I love the subtle nuances of words. I love the sound and shape of words. I, unfortunately, have a horrible vocabulary.

I'll blame this, like I blame many things, on my poor, poor memory. It's one of my two standard ducks (as in duck and run) when I fall short. The other, "I can't help it - I grew up in a houseful of boys!" may rate as an appropriate excuse for limited vocabular knowledge, but that one doesn't quite jive this time. Besides, my brothers get blamed for so many other fails on my part, I have to take responsibility for some of them.

Obama would be really proud of me.

But I digress.

As a word geek, I honestly did know the general definition of captivating, but I wanted to dig deeper, so I went to one of my most visited websites, Dictionary.com, to find out a little more.

I did this for several reasons:

• The aforementioned geek in me yearned to
• I really like to research stuff
• I do know the general meaning of the word, so I figured I'd get a nice ego boost
• Finally and probably most importantly, the word captivating brought to mind other related, but somewhat different, words: capture, captive, hostage, ransom...

This is how my mind works. Mysterious? Maybe not so much mysterious as enigmatic, perplexing, weird...

But I thought it was funny that a word that evokes women like Audrey Hepburn, and natural phenomena like the crash and rush of waves at the beach can also evoke such diametrically opposite images. How do you do that, English Language??

It's probably one of the reasons it's such a difficult language to learn. This fact is evidenced by the 14% of Americans who can't even understand it. It's not even a second language for them, for god'sake, unless, of course, you rate hick and redneck as languages unto themselves. But that is a discussion for another day, perhaps.

Back to captivating, though... Here's one more thought that popped into my mind: I'm quite sure I'd hate to be a hostage in any situation. I can't fathom being stuffed in a bamboo box for days, or being held at gunpoint and forced to do things I wouldn't ordinarily do, not to mention the lack of personal freedom of movement from place to place, thought to thought. It must be an excruciating existence. But, maybe. Just maybe? I might not so much mind it if I could really be such a captivating figure as Audrey and be captive while bodysurfing at the beach!

Nah. Probably not. Nevermind, universe.

Post Script: Kudos to you if you actually went to Dictionary.com to find that vocabular is, in fact, not a real word. I went there too, before I even finished that sentence. But I didn't really care because it described what I wanted it to describe quite rightly. Besides. Admit it. You understood exactly what I meant, didn't you?