Word up

I love words. Duh, I know. I like stringing them together and pulling them apart. I use as many dirty ones as I can get away with. But I tend to not use too many big ones. I shy away from most of those 10-cents and pricier varieties like the wallflower at a dance, always skirting around the edges and looking in with longing. Like many would-be writers before me, I spent the youth I should have been misspending poring over my Merriam-Webster and Roget's each time I found a new word while reading. But the writing I came to specialize in as an adult frowned on those grab-for-a-dictionary words. And being a practical gal by nature, I usually go for the simple and sturdy instead of fancy and foreign.

But that doesn't mean a particularly highfalutin word can't stop me in my tracks now and then. As if I needed more reasons to love Emma Thompson, she had to go out and break out a $1.10-word in her Proust Questionnaire answers for Vanity Fair this month.

Things were going along jovially, with a bit of Emma's trademark wit and good-natured self deprecation. (She called her “dimply thighs” the thing she liked least about her appearance and “cleanliness” the most overrated virtue.). And then, holy Shakespeare, out came the big one.

What is the quality you most like in a man?
Uxoriousness.

Time to break out the Merriam-Webster again:

Uxoriousness: adj.
“excessively fond of or submissive to a wife”

How could you not swoon? How could you not absolutely swoon?