Fiddlesticks and flapdoodle!

I’ve always been fascinated by words. I love the etymology of them. What was the first word? How did language develop? Why is it called a wardrobe? As a child I remember lying in bed at night unable to sleep imagining cavemen making sounds and choosing which one they liked the best to describe a rock!

I love using silly words too like collywobble, higgledy-piggledy and thingummybob. I totally blame Roald Dahl for this!

Today I went on a course all about phonics and spelling which sounds very boring and mundane but I found really fun – I’m such a geek! I love the idea that every word can be broken down into really small sounds and that by putting them together in different ways you get new words and new meaning. We played a game where you have a group of compound words which you need to rearrange in different combinations to make a new word and give a definition:


afterstorm – the feeling you get when someone has upset you
braindream – when you go to bed but can’t sleep because your brain keeps ticking over all your to do lists
eyeprint – what you see when you close your eyes after reading blogs all evening

Can you make a new favourite word? Try getting it into a sentence and see if anyone notices!