There are so many words I'd love to use as I write this blog but don't show off as I know readers would give up on me if they had to look up words to understand my meaning. I remember reading Gregory Bateson many years ago. He was an anthropologist who was married to another very famous woman anthropologist, Margaret Mead. These were the days before the ease of the Internet when the Oxford Dictionary was as much a friend to me as the toilet was to Bill Cosby's sequel to being sick and very drunk.
Bateson was brilliant. At least, that is what I assumed because I had to look up twenty or more words on one page of his writing. I looked up so many words I lost the basic messages in what he was writing. I particularly recall looking up one word which, interestingly, I don't remember today, thirty five years later. I only remember it meant 'swamp' I'm not even sure it is in this group of words: bog, bottoms, everglade, fen, glade, holm, marsh, marshland, mire, moor, morass, mud, muskeg, peat bog, polder, quag, quagmire, slough, swale, swampland. I only knew I had never heard the word before and wondered why he didn't just say 'swamp'.
Obtest is a lovely word meaning to beseech, plead or implore. "I obtest!" has a lovely sound in my head but not many people I know have the same obsession as I do about looking up words they don't understand. Thus, I obtest to those who write blogs: keep the vocabulary simple.
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