My friend Danny Deardorff, founder of the Mythsinger Foundation wrote to tell me this: “I found this on the web for you ‘Gloriosky’ is what Little Orphan Annie cried whenever she had a sudden surprise or revelation.”

Glorioski – I spelled it incorrectly but my psyche remembered that descriptive word. Because of my sore paw, I only metaphorically jump in delight as I read Danny’s message. Thank you for validating my use of that word. I bet it’s been residing in my childhood muse-bank ever since the ‘40’s because the original Orphan Annie might have been born in the 1930’s.

I “googled” glorioski myself just now and discovered another blogger used it back in 2009. He remembered his mother using it in the mid 1940’s to mean something like this. “Now isn’t that the darndest thing?”

My new dictionary does NOT include glorioski as a word, but if I use it often enough, maybe it will become recognized as one.

I love witnessing our language change.  As a young’un I often made up words because they sounded right to me. My parents, perfect but traditional wordsmiths, made fun of me, called me Mrs. Malaprop and my former husband, who just didn’t know any better at the time, said with conviction, “We can’t make up new words. That’s not how language works.”

Well I don’t know how else language could work. Someone somewhere has to make up the first words and then all the subsequent words, one root word or root syllable or prefix or “postfix” building on another. Our rapid electronic changes have brought in a host of new words, some already included in my new unabridged Oxford dictionary, like google and blog.

Glorioski, all of that makes me happy. As world citizens, we’re scrambling out of our verbal boxes. For millenia now, words have served to “linearize” us…to make us think in single, analytical lines assuming direct cause and effect – unwittingly – or maybe not – making us think we humans are the center of the universe, thus separating us from the profundity of polyphonic thinking and polymathic being.

Polymath, according to both Oxford and American dictionaries, refers to a person of wide ranging learning or knowledge, a generalist. Once upon a time that referred to a renaissance humanist but we can no longer afford that hubris. Now it refers to someone who sees the bigger picture and “understands how we fit into the larger creation of which we are a part – equal in importance and equally sacred with all life.” (p. 69)

Polymath is a new word to me, picked up in my reading yesterday from a brand new book whose title is also a new word to me. Zugunruhe  – a German word pronounced zoo gen ROO ha . It refers to the restlessness that occurs in migrating animals before they begin to move.- Zugunruhe – The Inner Migration to Profound Environmental Change by Jason F. McLennan is the full title. On page 21 he says: “…Zugunruhe should become a new word in our lexicon to describe all of us who seek to transform the way we live; restless for a new society that reconciles its relationship with the natural world.”

That’s really what my blog is all about! Today’s wisdom needs to embrace a new truth. The planet is both too complex and too elemental, the universe too vast and too convoluted, to think that we humans – with literal thinking and solitary expertise – can wiggle our way out of not changing how we live.

We need the wisdom of knowing we do not NEED to know everything to start on our evolutionary journey to becoming eco-citizens, embodied humans and digital natives.

And by the way, as if you didn’t already suspect this, Zester is a new word brought into being by my son, Dave. He designed an alphabet flashcard deck, his words, my images. More on that soon.

Glorioski…