Welcome to my blog.....

I guess I can say that I have spent a lot of time telling many friends and family members about my life's happenings via the internet. This is due to the fact that I have many friends and family who live all over Australia and indeed all over the world and the time differences makes email easier than phonecalls.

Feedback from a variety of these have included words of encouragement like "maybe you should write a book" not because my life is full of dramas, well not too many anyway, more so that my style of writing is an enjoyable read, so they tell me anyway. A book would be nice at some time however short stories appeal to me more at the moment and hence the creation of Blogtastical Banter.

I hope you enjoy my views on my life's situations and also situations which interest me, so sit back, relax and enjoy my ride.

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Sunday, January 29, 2012

An ultracrepidarian I am not, but I know one or two


Growing up I was never really into my English classes nor reading and so my appreciation for the English language didn’t rate very high at all in my world back then. My father, however, has a verbal repertoire which would have challenged William Wordsworth if Wordsworth was still with us.

My father, having grown up in South Australia, is often mistaken for English gentry due to his pronunciations of particular words. South Australia is the state where the English gentry settled and it was a “convict free” settlement when Australia was 'invaded' by the English. I grew up being corrected often with my Queensland pronunciations of certain words. For example, dad pronounced the word ‘castle’ as if he had been educated at Oxford, England, and so his pronunciation was ‘carsel’ where as the good ol’ Australian accent simply stated it as 'casel,' much to dad’s annoyance. He would state that we were going to a ‘darnce’ where I would say dance etc. A rockmelon fruit to us was just that, a rockmelon. However a South Australian would call it a cantelope. A school case or bag to Dad was known as a port and so it went on. Back then and to this day, friends will ask me if dad is English by birth due to his fabulous Oxford accent to which I explain the first settlement story to them.

Apart from his correct pronunciation of the English language, he is also a fabulous orator along with a magnificent wordsmith. I am sure that if you walked into his abode today and peruse the various magazines and newspapers containing crosswords that not one would not have been completed by my father.

It was not until later in my life that I started showing any real appreciation of the language which clearly Dad had grabbed on to at an early age. I commenced writing letters etc to which Dad commended me on my writing prowess and is one of the reasons I now have this blog. Regardless, I think I have come of age now and can now exclaim with pride that I currently have three books I am currently reading  and my blogtastical banter has given me the freedom to exercise my talents of writing which clearly did not arrive until fairly recently.

I have clearly inherited Dad’s love for words. All through my life and particularly during my schooling I would approach Dad for some assistance with regards assignments etc. He would always captivate me with his responses which would always contain at least one word which I had no idea meant. Feeling inferior, often I would simply nod and thank him for his help and hope that by the time I reached my study desk, I could hold that word in my head long enough to clamber through the dictionary and find not only the word but also the meaning and hence be able to complete the entire conversation we had just had together which would then make sense to me. I think it was from these ‘get togethers’ that finally, I realised there was much to learn when it came to my native tongue and that I should really show more appreciation of it by learning more about it.

Consequently, as my girls have walked through their years of education, the two books which I purchased when they were very young were indeed the Concise Oxford Dictionary and the accompanying Thesaurus. These two books still adorn my bookshelf and always will until I am some ‘six foot under.’

It is just recently that I too have commenced the challenge of crosswords in my local newspaper which apparently makes me a cruciverbalist. I do so enjoy the occasional medical question which occurs sometimes and which I usually have the answer to due to my nursing background. One beauty which is not found very often at all is the word choleduchojejunostomy which is a surgical procedure of the gastrointestinal system which I learnt in my nursing days but is seldom used now but I hold on to regardless. Regardless, to be brutally honest here I have a very long way to go to even becoming remotely close to Dad’s talents but that is OK. Words like belligerent, sanctimonious, ultracrepidarian are just a few I do so love to use when I can. Autolatry is one word some may currently use to describe me as I type this blog.

Regardless, I hope that I never grow tired of improving my English vocabulary. As my darling grandfather would often say to me, ‘every day you learn something which you should file away for future reference.’ How true this statement is. So clearly I have not only my wonderful father to thank for my newly found talents but also Poppa for forecasting what I do so appreciate....the magic of words and how I do so love to refer to those extra special ones on a regular basis.


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