Self-Possessed

Necessary navel-gazing

Welcome to Off the Clock, the fortnightly Saturday edition of Timeless & Timely that’s a fun look at language and words, with a smattering of history. If someone forwarded this to you, make sure you join us:

Et in Arcadia ego by Nicolas Poussin, 1637-8 (public domain - Wikipedia)

A strong sense of self is necessary for leaders.

Self-awareness. Self-reflection. Self-regulation.

And when it comes to ego, the self-absorption needs to give way to selflessness in service to others.

When it comes to words, we can loosely apply those principles as well.

Did a teacher ever tell you that if you’re trying to define a word, you can’t use that same word in the definition?

It’s a frustrating exercise for a young grammarian, as we struggle to find just the right combination of words — digging, digging, digging through the shallow sands of our limited vocabulary until we finally unearth some bauble that we can buff to a shine.

It isn’t until later that we discover the magic of autological words — words that express a property they also possess. A word that describes itself.

Let’s have some fun and explore some of them together.

Autological Terms

Some require a brief explanation:

• Password (when used as one, as it so often happens)

• Is (You ought to know what the definition of "is" is)

• Abbrev. (or abbr, if we want to keep it short)

And others ought to be fairly obvious.

• Pentasyllabic

• ALL CAPS

• Adjectival

• Adverbially

• Noun

And one more, just for fun:

Sesquipedalian (you probably are one if you don’t need to click on that link to know what it means)

If only these were the assignment in elementary school!

There’s so much to learn,