Second Post of the Day
Adding a few labels to a blog post helps with future searches, for me and for readers. And when I am adding a label, Blogger will suggests words it thinks I am writing.
Rarely do I pay any attention to those and simply finish my own typing, but recently the suggestions were popping so fast and with so many, that I ended up taking screen shots.
The word I was adding as a label?
Ian.
As in my grandson.
And here is the long list of words Blogger suggested that I might have intended to write:
As I think about it (the teacher in me has awoken!) I remember that the suffix "-ian" is a very common one. But I hadn't realized how much that three letter combination was also embedded within words and not as a suffix. (Dalmatian: suffix; piano: vowel arrangement within a word.)
I really do love the nuances of our language and how vowels and their placement affect pronunciation and even meaning.
The most fascinating many-voweled word I know, though, is not an English word even though it has become a part of our language, especially in Indiana. It's a word that means "place of the people of the whirlpool" and it refers to the area along the Wabash where the Wea people lived.
The word is "Ouiatenon." As in Fort Ouiatenon.
Four vowels in a row with a total of six vowels in the word! I used to challenge my students to find another word with four consecutive vowels and then, if they accomplished that, a word with six vowels in it. (No internet searches were allowed, at least not for the first 24 hours of the challenge.)
By now you may be thinking, "Whoa! Lynn was right - the teacher in her has awoken" and perhaps your eyes are even rolling up into your head. Sorry/not sorry!
Picture of me at my desk in my classroom drawn by Dave Sattler. An unexpected surprise, he gifted it to me after a visit to my classroom to talk to my students about drawing and it is framed and hanging in my bedroom. The kitty has its own story.
Stay 'tooned!
