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Vocab word: concatenate

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Call me weird, but when I come across a word that is unfamiliar to me, I have to find out what it means. Word nerd that I am, I put an icon for dictionary.com on my desktop so that I can look things up easily and immediately. Before the days of the internet, my kids would chuckle to see me get up & head for the big book. They really gave me a hard time when I designated a spot to keep the dictionary in the kitchen, right next to the table where it would be nice and handy. But now in this modern era I can stay in my chair & let my fingers do the walking - meaning that I don't get much physical exercise to accompany my mental activity. I don't always remember the definition, but the discovery is still fun.

An article caught my attention tonight because it was about beads in a bead shop. I am fascinated by the art of jewelry-making and have been collecting the components to start a new hobby. I was in a bead shop the other day & remembering that some shops offer classes. Sounds like fun to me.

The writer was telling about going into the shop and collecting choice beads in a little muffin cup and beginning to imagine "what dazzling concatenations might emerge from fashioning piles of beads into stunning pieces of jewelry." How lovely that sounded & I began to imagine what "concatenations" might be. So I clicked on my dictionary to find out. To concatenate is to link together, to unite as in a chain. A concatenation is a series of interconnected or interdependent things or events. Cool.

Turns out that she was comparing jewelry making to writing. The beads are like different types of words and the dazzling concatenations would be the sentences and writings that emerge when you put words together in the most pleasing way. She quoted Blaise Pascal, philosopher and mathematician (1623-1662), who noted, “Words differently arranged have different meanings, and meanings differently arranged have a different effect.”

Perhaps I can learn more about writing from my new jewelry-making hobby - if I ever find the time to get the beads out and try to be creative. Then again I have trouble finding time to write as much as I want to...

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