By: Blonde Two
Awesome (adjective) Extremely impressive or daunting; inspiring awe.
Awesome has become a bit of a throwaway word, in the modern vernacular (forgive me for sounding at least a hundred), it has been reduced to meaning ‘great’. The Urban Dictionary suggests that it is a word that ‘ the Americans use to describe everything.’
Yesterday, as Not-at-all-Blonde and I sat on a Dartmoor rock just below Sharp Tor and watched the eclipse, we experienced a little bit of original ‘awesome’. There wasn’t any strange animal behaviour, the Skylarks kept on singing, and we didn’t notice the eeriness in the atmosphere until the sun emerged from the arms of the moon; but to see two celestial beings, separated by millions of miles, dance together in such an elegant and intriguing way, was a privilege.
It was also a privilege to share the experience with my daughter and I found myself wondering later on, if we would return one day to the same rock and repeat the experience with her daughter. That, maybe would be the ultimate privilege.
I had the same eeriness on Rippon Tor with the larks all becoming silent. Wow.
That’s funny, I nearly chose Rippon Tor myself. An excellent vantage point!
In my garden there were birds still trying to feed and no doubt cursing the silly woman with the camera who was disturbing them, but the singing stopped and re-started as the sun grew bigger again – and though it was cloudy, the eclipse peeped through several times, so I have a piccie as well. Sadly, it has no detail and looks just like a cheeky moon lazing around, but there is a difference – I shall always KNOW it was the eclipse.
How about words that rhyme with awesome – winsome (clearly intended as an insult), lissom, blossom, possum, kingdom, selenium (a good one for you given your lunar tendencies), etc.
It occurs to me we don’t use the “-some” suffix quite enough and it has euphonistic attractions: bigsome, tallsome, funsome, joysome (hey, I’m getting to like this game), sexsome (not so good).
I have a dim conviction that gladsome exists.
And then, of course, there is blondesome. Perhaps even onesome and twosome.
Time to widen your scope, Blondes. English has a vocabulary of 400,000 words (vs. a miserable 200,000 for French) but there’s no need to limit yourself to this measly total. Allow Dartmoor to grab you and squeeze you into creativity. Seems to work best with single-syllable prefixes (nightsome, blandsome, greysome) – Dartmoorsome doesn’t really cut it, I think.
Apologies to Blonde One a few posts back. I responded to “Resignation” as if she were Blonde Two. Careless on my part. I am well aware she is entire and unto herself (a quote).