Do you want to know what editors talk about, deep in the dark recesses of their editorial warrens, when there’s no one around to hear? Words. Duh.
Today in the Humidor, in-between arguments over the proper placement of punctuation, discussions of the vagaries of version control software programs and the effects of subtle imagery on otherwise incomprehensible topics, we were making jokes about words. And yes, this is the part where you can safely back slowly away from this article and go read something about things that blow up, if you’re so inclined.
Go ahead. I understand.
The word of the day was almost “verve.”
“Edgy is played out,” said Joe, after I suggested we needed a word that meant “funny and dangerous,” and offered “edgy.”
“So what’s the new edgy?” I asked.
To which he answered: “Verve.”
Which is true. Verve is our watchword here at Team Humidor. It means everything “edgy” used to mean, and so much more. And you don’t see it much, which automatically qualifies it as “covetable” in the Editor’s Handbook. But “verve,” as awesome a word as it is, is not the word of the day; word of the year maybe, but not of the day.
Today’s word of the day was written into an email by Julianne, posted about on a web forum by this writer and spoken aloud in the Humidor by Joe all before any of us had mentioned it to the others. We tracked back a bit, and decided we hadn’t heard it anywhere else recently, it just came to us. All of us. At the same time. That, my friends, is what we call verve.
Today’s word is: pithy; a word which was spontaneously cogitated in the minds of no fewer than three editors, almost simultaneously, and about which I’ve just written this entirely too pithy blog entry. (I was going for verve.)
