This Christmas I ran across a several-year-old word list I had compiled from international magazines, college, and random happenchance.  I realized -- and agonized -- that I never learned those words for which I had been so thirsty when first I saw them.  My vocabulary is still horridly small, so near New Year's I resolved (in spite of my misgivings of the tradition of January 1st resolutions) to put these to celebration and use.  With newly-received 2011 wall calendar in hand, I was inspired to jot down each word onto a day in the calendar, in order to look it up, and use it at least once in a real conversation that day.  The words strung through July on the calendar, and I was super excited!

With family still present, this project began very exciting.  We sat down to dinner directly after I'd finished my transcribing, and as soon as the opportunity arose, I proceeded to mention how pleased I was that Eddy was comporting tonight!  It was received with quiet confusion.  In my usual way, I gushed forth with a rapid and exuberant explanation of my plan.  They were fine with it (not nearly as excited as I, but I was used to that).  And after a few days of histrionic, taciturn, and alacrity (all behavioral words, to my immense satisfaction), I was taken aback by Forrest's aptitude for word usage!  The man who hesitates to read to someone on account of clumsiness was thinking it the most obvious thing in the world that minutiae were small, unimportant details and correcting me on the pronunciation of echelons.

Perhaps these are all elementary level to you as well, but for an, apparently novice learner of words like me, it was a bit disconcerting and...just a tad humbling?  But it was all fascinating information, just the same.

One evening we visited our friends, Jonny and Taylor, for dinner while Eddy and Gramma were at a cousin sleepover.  For the next fleeting FIVE hours, we soaked in the contagious insouciance of our friends.  With our overpowering intensity of our personalities, Dan and I need that every so often.

I'll leave it to you to look it up.  Enjoy the words around you, and preserve the language you love!
insouciance