It’s probably right to suppose that we, people, that people created language the same way and for the same reasons as babies learn language. Point and name. Sun. Moon. Mountain. Cave. Woman. Big giant hairy mastodon. And so it’s likely that “word” is one of the first words that was named even though you couldn’t point at it and see it. How else could you say, what is the word for dinner? If there weren’t a word for word. What is that thing that you say when you mean 礎ig giant hairy mastodon’? No, you would definitely need a word for word. I wonder how long it took between the time of naming things that you could see and things that you do. It’s not a natural progression. Things, like babies, beg for names. But deeds, events, actions might trick names. Rain is a thing I can see and so I can name it. See there. Water from sky. That is rain. But 訴t rains’, or 訴t is raining’ is different. It’s temporary. It’s conditional. It passes. The first person who wanted to name an action was probably condemned and called crazy or heretic. But his sad story was quickly lost to our ancient storytellers because all the verbs were missing.

There is only one word in the dictionary that is the thing that it says it is: word. It signifies itself. Of course that’s a little imperfect. Word is the word, the unit of language, which signifies a word, a unit of language. It is the signifier and, unlike all the others, it is the signified.

This blog, as of today, has 161,360 words. I counted some of the words:

This: 764
Blog: 23
As: 800
Of: 3072
Today: 65
Has: 296
161,360: 1
Words: 79

The Oxford English Dictionary lists about 500,000 words. Most people know about 20,000 words. The average person uses about 2,000 words in a week.

These are some words that I say a lot, or thought that I did until I counted:

Presumably: 15
Still: 362
Meanwhile: 81
Nevertheless: 7
Evidently: 14
Exile: 22

And I also learned that I started sentences with 疎nd’, 925 times, if you count this one. And I did. But I didn’t count that one. My grade 5 teacher, a nice doughy woman with hair the color of cherry wood, told me that I used the word 創ice’ too often and told me not to use it anymore. I used the word 創ice’ in this blog on 48 occasions. I occasionally spell 双ccasion’ wrong � more than occasionally, I almost always spell occasionally wrong. I used the word 双ccasion’ 17 times and the word 双ccasionally’ 8 times. Thanks to spellcheckers and to compulsively checking my spelling, there are 0 occasions of 双cassion’, 双cassions’, 双cassionally’, 双ccassion’, 双ccassions’, or 双ccassionally’.

I like the word 壮alacious’. I have used it only once. I also like the word 創onplus’ which I have used only twice now. I have also only used the word 阻ubilee’ once. The word 壮ex’ appears 39 times; mostly because I delete my spam.

I have used 158 semicolons. I have asked 698 questions. I don’t like exclamation marks. So imagine my surprise when I found I had 92 of them! But only three were mine. And one was part of 糎ham!’. So really I only used two. Three now. The other 89 exclamation points were from evidently happy and enthusiastic commenters.

Does anybody ever imagine somebody’s surprise? 699 questions. I say 蘇appy’ 80 times. Exactly twice as many as 壮ad’. I also said the word 疎ngry’ as many times as 壮ad’. One part sad, one part angry, two parts happy, and never, or nearly never, exclamatory.

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