summer is finally over!
there are only about 19 hours left of summer—so now’s your last chance to steal a smooch underneath the boardwalk or to “experience” the latest superhero movie and then pretend you had no idea it would be so supremely awful. all we have now to keep us warm during the cold, dark days ahead are the 12 words of the word summer series.
the annual challenge*: write a story about your 12 weeks of summer using the following 12 words of the word summer series.
- crookle · to coo as a pigeon
- pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis · a factitious word alleged to mean ‘a lung disease caused by the inhalation of very fine silica dust’ but ocurring chiefly as an instance of a very long word.
- gossipry · a body of gossips
- pulvil · perfumed powder for powdering the wig
- enatation · an escape by swimming
- lakke · one hundred thousand items, especially coins
- ben trovato · of a story: appropriate even if untrue
- gongoozler · a person who stares at anything for a long time
- belgard · a kind or loving look
- palpebrous · having large eyebrows
- tyromancy · divination by means of cheese
- polydoggery · the keeping of a number of dogs
__
*if you take me up on this tempting challenge, let me know and i’ll link to your efforts in a subsequent post.
My attempt:
I can crookle very well. It was my party trick as a child; I used to spend my summers cooing across the lake by my grandmother’s house in Suffolk. She’s into tyromancy and recently read in a particularly ripe stilton that a boy was coming my way soon. My Suffolk summer was therefore dedicated to finding him. A gossipry of old ladies in the village caught on to my venture and would laugh at me as I waited hopelessly on the park bench. One week our village pharmacy ran out of pulvil, so the old ladies all got terrible sores on their bald scalps – served them right. One of them tried to apply silica dust to her wig instead, but she caught pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis and was rushed off to hospital. That turned the attention of the old ladies elsewhere, as they spent their afternoons picking lakke flowers to take to her bedside. On a rare warm Sunday I was swimming in the lake when I spotted him. The boy. He was standing on the bank opposite me. I thought he had shot me a belgard, but apparently he’s always doing that. I later found out that he’s a gongoozler. Normally I can see that in a guy’s eyes, but this one was so palpebrous that his features were partially hidden.
He pulled down his speedos and started wading towards me. I had to make a quick enatation, startling ducks as I splashed clumsily onto the bank.
Boyfriend hunt is cancelled; I shall take up polydoggery instead. Here ends my ben trovato.
