Choosing My Words

A friend, knowing how fed up I am with the overuse of the word "amazing," sent me this treasure. I shall study it. My only sadness is that it contains "awesome," which wore me out about twenty years ago.

Another friend has been posting a daily gratitude on Facebook for a few weeks. This got me to thinking about being grateful and wondering whether grateful differs from thankful. I think it does, but right now I can't pinpoint the specifics. Then there's appreciative. I guess grateful and thankful imply being grateful/thankful to someone whereas appreciative doesn't involve someone else in the transaction. This is just top-of-the-head thinking.

Another set of words that I've pondered of late is lucky-fortunate-blessed. A lot of people tend to use them as though they are synonyms, but for me, they are not.

My husband tells me that when we first met I told him, "I don't believe in luck." Wikipedia reports that luck is "a purposeless, unpredictable and uncontrollable force that shapes events favourably or unfavourably for an individual, group or cause." I don't think there is such a thing. But I find that sometimes I hear myself saying, "Boy, THAT was lucky!"

Fortunate is about tangible things, wealth and goods of various kinds. Fortunate has to do with having enough to eat, having a place to live, having clothes to wear and things to play with.

Then there is blessed. Which, to me, seems to mean "looked favorably upon by God." 

Those are my deep thoughts about words for today. Now I'm going to study the list to the left. Because I'm seldom, if ever, truly amazed.