A love for words, literal words.

When I was a kid, I found myself somewhat obsessed with vocabulary, spelling, and eventually dictionaries. In middle school, I had a collection of antique ones - mostly Webster or Merriam before they combined, and then some combo. In early windows days, I found myself enamored with Clippy and all of the tools nestled within Microsoft Word.

Perhaps 2nd or 3rd grade, and especially in 4th and 5th, I began using the word processor to write poetry and design Word Art headings to go with these poems.

Also of note - my grandma would’ve been spending summers with us through a chunk of this time. She, a short, fiery, Irish, 40 yr English teaching veteran of Chicago schools, taught me how to write and edit, for many hours.

This is here because when I looked up ‘antique thesaurus’ on Google, this is what it gave me.

At some point, I began right-clicking on adjectives — every single one in my doc, in fact — and subbing it out for a “better” one. These could be found in a short list, beyond the right click menu and into the synonyms. Or, that would start the journey, and I’d dive into literal thesauruses (which later subbed for online ones).

It actually made my writing hideous - but it showed a desire from an early age to communicate BOLDER, bigger, GET THROUGH, make my writing FANCY.

Of course, journalism school in college beat the hell out of me. Especially freshman year, when I learned the hard way about news writing versus the fluff feature land I was living in. And you know what? I got better. I probably wrote better in college than I did any time of my life. 

I got published in big papers, front pagers on complex issues. I grinded out interviews and reports and even magazine style features that mattered so much more than anything I dreamed I could write about.

I still love adjectives, but they feel so much less necessary to me - when the writing is clear. 

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My therapist for a bit, post-college, told me that she knew someone that loved words, too. He collected them. They called him a word merchant. After that, I started screenshotting definitions and even getting curious about things like copywriting and writing for online publications (Bitter Southerner, I’m still coming for you one day!). I would mock up query letters I’d learned about in college, obsessing over a letter I’d never get around to send.

Eventually, I did end up copywriting quite a bit. First, in a small capacity - marketing materials, newsletters, interviews, blogs, ghostwritten content… And then later, in a bigger capacity - as a copywriter for the emails and text messages I crafted and rigged as a part of digital marketing efforts. The best stuff came when I took notes on the office chat among a bunch of coworkers who happened to be veterans. Just 1 word from their repository, and an SMS text message I authored would go wild among our also largely veteran audience.

I spend a good chunk of time doing it now, too - writing. Blogs like this, strategy and context explaining, story-ing otherwise mundane data and insights…a newsletter here and there…

Words are funny.