The J Word.

Yesterday I was playing my own version of Stadt Land Fluss: Find an adjective with each letter of the alphabet to describe me. You can guess I didn’t play by myself, but in fact was merely adding if I didn’t like the suggestions - E for exhausting? Come now! When one could rather call me elegant, eagle-eyed (okay, that would be a complete lie), eloquent... you see my point. So when I was called terms like exhausting, I had to step in and help out.

The next few letters went down a lot better, but then we got stuck on J. Jealous was the first thing that popped into my mind – oh joy. Needless to say I wasn’t going to say that out loud. So this morning, since I don’t own an actual dictionary, I made it my mission to look up words with J online. I was looking to find lots of words like fabulous, amazing, sexy, etc. starting with a J. No such luck. The best I found were joyful, jubilant, and joyous (pretty much the same as joyful if you ask me). Anything better doesn’t exist. I found:

Jawed: yes, I have a jaw. Revelation of the day.

Jet-lagged:  only applies about twice a year.

Juicy: not that bad I guess.

Jussive aka bossy. Me? Never.

Then I already had to move onto the nouns for anything interesting (don’t ask how I defined interesting this morning):

Jack-in-the-box: I’m just amazed that made it in a dictionary.

Jamaica rum: goes without words.

Jellyfish: I like a lot, especially on a plate at Kyoto Garden.

Jeu d’esprit:  hope this will be one!

Journey Cake: padkos? No, term for some sort of corn cake in New England.

Juju: that’s magic. The son of my Hamburg flatmate was called Juju. How cute!

Juneteenth: history lesson for the day - “June 19, an African-American holiday commemorating the date in 1865 when many slaves in Texas learned they had been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation (January 1, 1863).”

Now come a whole lot of junior boxers: junior bantamweight, junior featherweight, junior flyweight, junior heavyweight, junior lightweight, junior middleweight. All of them full-fledged dictionary words.

Then I lost interest in the Js, hoping to move onto the I soon (I’m thinking incredible, intelligent, inspiring). One last thought went to the dear Oxford dictionary people though: why can I find junk bond but not James Bond? That just doesn’t make sense to me, especially since he is British too...