Friday, October 20, 2017

Five Minute Friday: DISCOVER


Today I'm linking up with the Five Minute Friday community, writing for five minutes on a given prompt. This week's word is DISCOVER.



I have been staring at the word "discover" all day, trying to think what to write about it.

Normally when we hyphenate this word at the end of a line, it looks like this:

dis-
cover

"Dis" means reverse (as in disentangle), so "discover" means reversing the covering, as it were: revealing and showing something that was previously hidden.

But if we hyphenate "discover" in the wrong place at the end of a line, it might become

disc-
over

and then it's reminiscent of the old days when we used to listen to vinyl records: "Please turn that disc over; Side A is done."

And if we change the verb "discover" to the noun "discovery" and hyphenate that incorrectly at the end of a line, we might get 

disco-
very

which allows us to continue with the musical theme: "I never really liked disco very much."

These are some of the fascinating discoveries I have made while pondering the word "discover."

They may not be the most profound insights ever unearthed -- but I like to think that all the best discoveries come from a process of taking things apart, rearranging them, looking at them in new ways, trying and failing and trying again ... and eventually dis-covering what was hidden and revealing it for all the world to see.




7 comments:

  1. I love this! I'm a word girl, too, so I enjoyed this little sneak peak into the inner workings of your brain. It sounds so familiar. (FMF #62)

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    Replies
    1. That's a little scary, Tanya! Ha ha! Thanks so much for reading and commenting. Words are so awesome.

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  2. And then there's this variation with a slight misspelling:
    Disc-
    ovaries

    Those are the genesis of all those uncased and unlabeled CDs I keep finding, having no idea what's on them or why they were made in the first place.

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  3. Fascinating! Love where you went with this

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  4. Yes, I think I just wasn't in the headspace for anything deep. Discover is a rich word yet I just kept looking at it until it didn't even look like a word anymore....

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