A GOOD WORD FOR US ALL

Oh, it is another new word today. How I love new, delicious words.

How is this one: BOMBINATE: To buzz, to hum; to drone. It comes from a Latin word meaning “a boom.” And the second “b” is pronounced - bom-bin-ate.

Examples of its use are as follows:

“He is often drunk. His head hurts. Snatches of conversation, remembered precepts, prefigured cries of terror bombinate about his skull.”

“Sometimes the computer bombinates way into the night, stops for a bit of rest, then resumes its hum at the early hours of the morning.”
Oh my gosh! I like this word almost as much as I liked “peculate.”

Perhaps the reason I like it is that I personally have experienced both uses. For the first example although I was not often drunk I did have one spectacular episode when I was in that lost time after my divorce and didn’t know how to drink. As many of you know, I married Joe when I was not yet 21 and we were not drinkers, though we did on occasion have a beer. After we’d been married for a few years we tossed our lot in with an evangelical church and at that point we didn’t drink at all. So after my divorce when I would have one of the rare dates (not many man wanted to date a woman with 4 young children), we often went to dinner and then dancing afterwards. It only took one time of drinking and then experiencing a bout of bombination for me to get hold of myself and vow that it would never happen again. And it didn’t. (Brendan, are you listening?)

But also while I was sitting here at my daughter’s computer this morning (I'm in Los Angeles house-sitting)readying to log on, I once again realized how much noise her computer setup makes. It sounds like someone in the neighborhood is mowing their lawn... and mowing...and mowing. It has a faint hum with a pitch that waivers up and down. They have way too much hooked up to it for me to figure out just what or why it is doing this. (Well, I learned early on anyway not to ask “why” a computer does anything, because even if someone knows, you’ll never understand their answer.) Anyway, that little foray of thought reminded me that when I first got on the internet back in 1997 I had a dial up modem. Not knowing much about the internet, or my computer either for that matter, I set it so that AOL would send out all my e-mails at 2 a.m. I don’t know why I did that. I guess I thought one was supposed to do it that way. But in the middle of the night I was awakened by my computer automatically using my dial-up modem by itself and then sending all my e-mail before shutting itself down again.

Now that isn’t quite what the second example above is talking about, but I think anything the computer does while a body is not sitting at the controls can be considered some form of bombinating.

So there is my word for the day – and a special thanks to the people who wrote those very interesting sentences that caused me to reflect on things past. Be assured that I will be adding bombinate to my vocabulary and will be eagerly waiting for just the right opportunity to use it!