Tuesday, February 27, 2024

The Look It Up Club

Once upon a time, I was a fourth grader. I had a magical teacher named Mr. Hall. After lunch, he read us chapter books.

He introduced me to a club where I have been a lifelong member.

The “look it up” club. It wasn’t a club in reality. It was a way of engaging children, me, with a love of looking up the meaning of words.

I love it when I am reading and I stumble on a word I’m not familiar with; or a word I don’t see often; or a mix of words that aren’t commonly used together.

Brain bleach – it means just what it sounds like. Something to clean your brain of nastiness. What a valuable thing for these times.

Recently I was reading one of my favorite authors, Jayne Ann Krentz, writing as Jayne Castle. She used the words psychic dissonance. I am fixated on the concept of cognitive dissonance and consonance. But psychic dissonance – intriguing.

Psychic means relating to the soul or mind.

Dissonance means a tension or clash between two disharmonious or unsuitable elements. An example being the current dissonance between a politicians words and their behavior.

Psychic dissonance would then be a clash in the mind caused by two conflicting thoughts or energies.

Maybe a good example would be so many romance readers who love books where the hero is an alpha male. They love to read such a fictional character on the page but in reality they would never allow a real man to treat them that way.

Another example might be – I was watching Gordon Ramsey cook with someone else. That person put shaved chocolate on their cooked ground beef. Gordon could not wrap his mind around the notion of chocolate on ground beef but when he tasted it – it was good.

Psychic dissonance – it’s enough to give me a wordgasm.


De Doo Doo Doo by the Police



No comments:

Post a Comment