NEW WORDS

A few inches of snow fell overnight.  Woke up this morning to the sound of vehicles removing snow from the parking lots and sidewalks.  Sun's shining now.

Venny friends dropped off homemade dressing (stuffing), knowing that I simply adore dressing and could eat it every meal.  Can't wait for supper now.

Not a whole lot going on.  Have been online floating from research, to videos, to movies, to news briefings of latest shootings, to playing online games, to working word puzzles, and along the way visiting live streams from Nepal, Japan and South Korea.  Who else besides me has gotten caught up in watching mukbang videos?  That's a topic for another day.

Learned a new word.  The English language is growing, with new terms describing this time in history.  "Swatting is a criminal harassment tactic of deceiving an emergency service (via such means as hoaxing an emergency services dispatcher) into sending a police or emergency service response team to another person's address.  This is triggered by false reporting of a serious law enforcement emergency, such as a bomb threat, murder, hostage situation, or a false report of a mental health emergency. such as reporting that a person is allegedly suicidal or homicidal and may or may not be armed, among other things."   The term is derived from the law enforcement unit SWAT (special weapons and tactics), a specialized type of police unit in the United States.

This brings to mind the "old-fashioned" paper dictionary, which at one time was like a bible for the uncountable times I needed to look up the meaning of a word, or a legal term.  To this day, a Black's Law Dictionary stands beside the American Heritage Dictionary that a criminal trial lawyer gave to me.  Throughout my life, words have intrigued me more than anything else I can think of.  What's way cool now is having the web on my iPhone, so I can look up anything anywhere there is wi-fi service.  Fifty years ago I would've thought that would be comparable to heaven.  Sometimes we have to pause and take a good appraisal of our blessings...the perks that quietly come to us along the way.