Gryphon's Word of the Day, April 2, 2007

The word of the day for April 2, 2007 is “prehensile” — adjective 1 : adapted for seizing or grasping especially by wrapping around <prehensile tail>. 2 : gifted with mental grasp or moral or aesthetic perception.

Sometimes I truly wonder at my husband’s sense of humor. He often laughs at things for reasons that are incomprehensible to me. Case in point: picking things up with my toes keeps me from bending over with the potential of overbalancing onto portions of my anatomy that I’d rather not be in contact with the floor. I don’t claim to be as agile as that woman without arms, who writes and puts on her make-up with her feet. Still I can get dropped tissues, clothing and so on. There is nothing amusing about that.

Sometimes when he laughs at me I have no idea why. I’ve been minding my own business, and he starts laughing to incoherence. He never explains either, except to grab me in a big bear hug and say, “I love ya, babe—love ya, love ya, love ya.” Well maybe he finds loving me amusing—and it is certainly better than having him yell at me for some idiot thing like ordering two pieces of chicken and not letting the sales clerk talk me into three as “they are the same price as two.”

The quote for today is from Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist. Journals, entry for Aug. 19, 1851 (1906):

     The way in which men cling to old institutions after the life has departed
     out of them, and out of themselves, reminds me of those monkeys 
     which cling by their tails—aye, whose tails contract about the limbs, 
     even the dead limbs, of the forest, and they hang suspended beyond 
     the hunter’s reach long after they are dead. It is of no use to argue with  
     such men. They have not an apprehensive intellect, but merely, as it were
     a prehensile tail.

;^)  Jan

Tags: prehensile