The human brain is funny sometimes; at least I believe mine is.
This morning I looked up Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day, as I do every morning. I didn't find the word "appreciable" fascinating enough to post it on my blog, but it made me think about the words "quantifiable" and "qualifiable"... which made me think whether I had ever used the word "qualifiable" in my writing... which, in turn, made me think about a weird word I recently learned: callipygian.
Callipygian, pronounced kal-i-PIJ-ee-an, sounds technical, like a scientific term, but it's about a completely non-technical subject. It describes someone with beautifully shaped buttocks. The word is a combination of two Greek words: kallos (beauty) and pyge (buttocks), which makes it oddly specific. Despite having such a precise meaning, it's rarely used in everyday language and feels almost too formal or poetic for what it's describing. The human butt is definitely qualifiable, but I still find the word callipygian a strange and formal way to talk about something so ordinary.
Let me go back to the human brain for a second, specifically my brain: How did it go from appreciable to callipygian? What kind of word web was it weaving?
