Interesting Twists

  Call me an old fogey if you wish but, for the life of me, I cannot understand a lot of the language used these days.  When writing, folks use a lot of acronyms in place of words and even those have changed since I was a kid trying to be cool.  About half of a written paragraph is made up of a bunch of random letters smashed together to supposedly make a phrase.  It is stupid, when you think of it.  No one is going to be able to write a decent book at this rate.  It will be filled with things like BTW, LOL, IMO, OMG and THX.  That last one is a bit confusing as it means thanks...understood...I guess...but then TQ means thank you.  How?  Simply how?  How does that Q translate to you?  Yep, I am getting old.  But it is not just acronyms that get my feathers ruffled.  There are a ton of new words or old words that have new meanings that are merely out there to befuddle old folks like me.  Take for instance "Twitter" that used to be something that birds did.  "Tweet", again...birds.  Now, those have totally different meanings and if you use them in the original sense, folks look at you like you are weird.  Perhaps, I am.  Some of the new meanings to old words are not so nice so you have to be careful what you say!

  So, when my cousin wrote that she was out "twigging", it took me aback a bit.  I was not sure just what she was doing or even if I wanted to know.  You can imagine my relief when I found out that she was actually using the word in a way that made sense.  She was twigging, indeed.  Truth be known, she was gathering twigs for her wood-burning stoves.  Makes sense and is something that we share.  I have long used the word for the very same thing.  On my hikes around the hillside, I gather twigs.  It is a two-fold task as it cleans the yard at the same time gives me firewood.  A old cast iron wood-burning stove can burn for about an hour on a handful of hefty twigs.

  This morning, I gathered my usual bundle of twigs and dumped them down in the old tub that sits by the wood-burning stove in the living room.  As I did, I pondered if my grandmother would approve.  This tub was her old soap-making pot and never held a dirty twig in its whole time on this earth until I came in possession of it.  Now instead of making soap out of lye which is made from potash, it holds the twigs that make the potash to make lye for soap-making.  Interesting twist on things when you think of it. So I guess folks who twist words around to suit their needs are not that far removed from my twisting the use of a pot around to suit mine.