Any of you who have been reading my work for a while now, know that I am fascinated by words. This week I am particularly interested in the word tchotchkes, although kerfuffle, chutzpah and bubkes are also at the top of the list of words with which I would love to play at some point in time. I think each of those words is fun to say, and all of them are most effective in describing as only solid adjectives are able to do -- even though each of those words is actually a noun -- albeit a colorful one...
It is only recently that I came to know how to spell any of the words mentioned above, and that makes it only more fun to write about one of them. I have to tell you that I am not a good speller, never have been, in spite of the fact that I love words. The age of spell checker has changed my life. Auto-correct still has a few issues as far as I am concerned, but spell check or the red underline in word processing that gives you options -- heaven for me. (Thank you, whoever you are. You are a language hero as far as I am concerned.)
Anyway -- I do love stuff and a bit of that are tchotchkes. When I was much younger, I was big into pennants of places where we traveled on summer vacations and then later on I displayed pennants of the colleges of my friends. There was also the charm bracelet of my teenage years that I wish I could find today. (Have you noticed that they are coming back in the updated Pandora fashion of the moment?) But anyway -- the tchotchkes that are at the top of the dust gathering list for me are the two trophies that I have "won" -- two -- in my entire life. The first was a junky trophy made of compressed paper and bits of wood that has since disintegrated. I was so proud of it -- I won it in Junior Golf -- it was the kind of trophy that one wins for participating with a good attitude.... I was never a good athlete -- not that girls had many sports in which to participate back in the day. The second trophy is the one I won in a speech competition when I was in high school. It was for an original oration and I beat a young man who had won his previous eleven competitions. Over fifty years later, I still remember his name. Wonder if he is on Facebook? Recently I discovered that I still have a note that my sister wrote me from college at that time telling me congratulations -- celebrating what she called my gift of gab. (I cherish that note.) But -- back to the focus of this blog -- that trophy is, I know, somewhere here in my office. I distinctly remember putting it on a shelf when I moved into this house now fifteen years ago. It's for sure behind some books... you see - many of my book shelves are two rows deep with books. Are books tchotchkes of a sort? Probably not, but the things I display in front of them and in back of them are -- those "things" may be dust collecting trinkets, but they are also memory keepers ... treasures for sure. Tchotchkes....
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