The joys of freelancing #5 ... pronking!

pronk verb (of a springbok or other antelope) leap in the air with an arched back and stiff legs, typically as a form of display or when threatened

This morning I was telling a fellow freelancer how much I enjoy the variety of work I can get involved in working for myself. After a rather hectic few months over the summer working on quite a challenging ELT project, I'm now ticking along with some more mundane lexicography work. Most of the job is fairly routine stuff, scanning through entries, checking for various picky little details that need changing, but rather than being 'boring', I'm finding it oddly calming. It's nice to have some straightforward, regular work with clear parameters, set hours and a simple brief for a change.

And because it's a native-speaker dictionary, there's the added bonus of coming across odd words that I've never heard before, one example the other day being 'pronk'! It made me laugh out loud, so I thought it was worth sharing ... now the challenge is to try and slip it into conversation!

Favourite words

A couple of days ago, I came across voluminous as an answer to a crossword clue. I was on my own at the time, but couldn't resist saying it out loud, just to enjoy rolling the sounds around my mouth! I think some of my favourite words are the ones that sound good.

I have a feeling that I've written in a previous post about the joy of getting allocated the "squ..." section to work on in a dictionary - it's just so full of wonderfully evocative words. There are the soft, soggy ones - squash, squeeze, squelch, squidgy, squirt, squishy - and the grating, high-pitched ones - squawk, squeak, squeal.

Forget the meaning, for me, it's all about the feel!