peppering our language with the spice of creative conversation

parsipitous....

the unabridged dictionary online is closely guarded and nearly impossible to access, like an item hidden in the basement of the Vatican. I have never found “parsipitous” in the unabridged dictionary, yet I have the word and meaning in my brain. so surely it must be in there somewhere.

unless it is just in my brain, and then we must blame Shakespeare for my wanton creativity.

“Parsipitous,” although a bit vague, refers to the act of parse/parsing an item, like a sentence. When one parses a sentence, when studying sentence structure, one identifies the parts, the grammatical components, of the sentence. As a language nerd, I remember parsing Latin sentences in both high school and college….on and on and on. In fact, the act of parsing these sentences became a bit parsipitous. Like ambition, one gushing with ambition becomes ambitious. So it is with parsing. One fixated upon parsing sentences becomes parsipitous. We could even describe such a behavoir as leaning toward the desire to parse everything.

So, like the guest at your dinner table who must keep the peas, potatoes, and chicken separate from each other, never touching, parsing the portions on the dinner plate, that individual has exhibited parsipitous behavoir. Especially, if when the dessert, say fried ice cream, comes, that the diner attempts to separate the components of the cinnamon-covered beauty on the plate.

we owe it to the future to pepper our language with the spice of creative conversation. Like Shakespeare, who invented words if the skeletal conversation did not meet his approval after composing the sentence, we can ice that cookie with a creative word, based on the principles, or rules, of conventional English. This world would be a better place if we did, and we could surely argue- with examples to the contrary- with those who have declared Western Civilization, or the English tongue, to be “in decline.”

so, if you see parsipitous behavior, be sure to point it out to the one engaging in such behavior. again, we owe it to spread the joy of enriching the soil of our collective vocabularies.

(Reference- former post- “