A cursory Google search shows that Maryanne Wolf is the first to use "the examined word" in the context of Socrates' ideas and quote, "The unexamined life is not worth living."
I understand the impracticality of vetting each word before you put it in a sentence for consumption. However, I think the more you know about your materials, the more you can appreciate the craft and finished product. I love the light a word's history can shed on its use. I probably enjoy it even more when a word's history and current use are more disparate.
Most of the words I'll feature here are words that piqued my curiosity through everyday usage. I jotted them down, and maybe I looked them up in my bedside dictionary later, maybe not. Sometimes there's a striking revelation in their etymology, sometimes not, but either way I know, and I've been told that that's half the battle. Other words might come from a word of the day email that struck me and was forwarded to my other account.
The dictionaries I have at home, and will go to first, are a Shorter Oxford English Dictionary Fifth Edition, a Webster's Collegiate Dictionary Fifth Edition from Merriam-Webster from 1947, another Merriam-Webster--Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary from 1965, and Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language College Edition by World Publishing from 1960.
Tomorrow we begin.
