Readers and writers blog

If you like words as much as we do — and if you’re reading this, chances are you do — then you may like a weblog by the same name, Words, as much as we do.

Written by Kevin Dickinson, a 21-year-old Rutgers student who also works part-time, Words is a relatively new site — barely three months old — but is blossoming into a celebration of those unique things we call, yes, words, and the uses to which they can be put.

As the blog’s subtitle says, “What is writing but a unique sequence of words?” In a sidebar called Where Are You, here’s one of those sequences Dickinson has assembled:

Picture a vast, flowing field of wheat. Or, if you prefer a cliché, picture some amber waves of grain. Imagine, say, a hectacre of them. But remember that a hectacre is a deceiving unit of measure — it is not 10 acres, but rather 2.47.

So somewhere in this 2.47 acres of wheat (you may approximate) is a single stalk. Or maybe it’s a grain. What do they call one wheat? Is it a blade? A wheaticle?

Focus on your wheaticle. This one among thousands. Then zoom in with your imagination and look at just the top of it, where those mini ‘branches’ are growing off. Then look at only ONE branch, and on that branch, a single cell growing on its tip.

Are you still with me? Okay, good. I need you to picture a gnat bothering that cell. It’s flying around the cell’s head, pestering it simply because that’s what gnats do best.

This blog is the gnat. That’s how insignificant and obscure it is on the Internet . . .

Haven’t we all felt that way?

Now in the blog’s mainbar, the most recent posts we found include “Neologism of the Day,” Oct. 31, which defines the day’s new word, ‘crapolantern’ (complete with a pronouncer), as “the result of maladroit carving skills on an unshapely pumpkin.”

New words are a specialty of Dickinson, who has invented a ‘neophrastic superfluary’ — a dictionary, shown as an old leather-bound tome with a cleverly Photoshopped title (see above), that contains only “superfluous words of the editor’s own creation.”

Another of those words, ‘decafejection,’ is defined in the Oct. 21 post as two types of disappointment, both when a cup of coffee is finished — the first at the sight of the bottom of the cup and the second at its near-weightlessness. And then there’s a third definition:

The act of defenestrating a container of decaffeinated coffee because it is decaffeinated.

Obviously, a coffee lover.

Two other recent entries — well, they’re all recent, although the total number of posts when we visited already amounted to 56 — worth special mention are “All Hallows’ Eve: A Vile Poem,” set to the cadence of Clement Moore’s 1822 poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” and a short story called “Lobster Bisque.”

The short story involves a lowly supermarket employee named Cody, a huge lobster reminiscent of Julius Caesar and a crazed meats-and-seafood manager named Mohammed. Beyond that, we don’t want to reveal too much detail.

The poem involves a visit by bloodthirsty zombies from a cemetery to a nearby home in which they imagine the family of five — Mr. and Mrs. Flask and their three children — are sleeping peacefully. Ah, zombies can be so wrong.

Another kind of poetry is the theme of a Sept. 20 entry, “The Musical Perils of Acorn-Bearing Dendrites.” Despite its tongue-in-cheek title and tone, this brief piece combines the sounds of falling acorns and a leaking toilet in a musical motif described as “oddly attractive,” and we agree.

And to see how a writer’s focus can change from day to day, check out the back-to-back entries on Oct. 10 and 11. The first, “Compital Oppilation Theory” (no neologisms there, as far as we can tell), discusses with mathematical logic and analysis why four-way traffic gets snarled during rush hour. The next, “Rain Fast Approaching,” is a transcendently simple discovery about a phenomenon of nature.

Although it’s hard to judge a weblog that is so new, we have skimmed his other website, Sincerely Insane, a series of letters dating back to 2005, and we get the impression that Dickinson is progressively broadening as a writer. We hope he continues with Words so that we can continue to share and enjoy them.

– Sid Leavitt