365 Words Beginning with P

It’s only been three days but already a Plethora of P words are Percolating up into consciousness. A plethora of words with so much Possibility: paradox, patience, petrified, power, place, passwords (don’t you HATE them? How many do you have and how do you remember which works with what?), presidents (now there’s a topic!), penguin, pork, pinkeye, pansies (in bloom now on my supermarket’s shelf) … and I have several pages of other P words waiting in the wings.

Plethora means “a superabundance, an excess.”

What a bounteous word! It calls up cornucopias and the mythical Pitcher that stays full no matter how much is Poured from it, the colors of spring, all the Plant and animal species that inhabit our Planet, the number of stars that used to glow from the sky when I was a kid camping out (back before light Pollution), the overpowering love a mother feels for her baby. The bottomless well of generosity I want to find in myself.

Plethora was the first special vocabulary word I recall learning as I Prepared for college entrance exams, and it was delicious because it sounded so grown up. We sprinkled it liberally in our conversations, along with apotheosis and nadir.

You gotta love these guys. I could quit writing now; they pretty much cover the letter P. In song, yet. From 1971

When something bugs you, you have a couple of choices: bitch and whine about it, or deal with it constructively.

It’s easiest, of course, to bitch and whine. Who doesn’t love to complain loudly about how rotten things are, how you’ve been wronged, how unfair life is, what an asshole that person is? The longer you carry on, the more righteous you feel.

Unfortunately, with this strategy the irritant only grows more irritating and you may lose some friends; most of us don’t like whiners.

The alternative is to deal with the irritant. Who knows? In the process you might create something much better.

The oyster takes this route. A piece of sand gets between his two shells (and nowadays a human being actually places the piece of sand there – how cruel is that?). This no doubt scratches or pinches most uncomfortably, so he exudes a smooth shiny material called nacre to cover it up and round out the rough edges.

Et voilà! A pearl. Something of beauty and value.

Benjamin Franklin said, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” I say, “Irritation is the mother of the pearl.” We’re both saying the same thing.

It’s not easy to greet the obstacle as an opportunity to create a pearl. But every day I’m offered countless such opportunities, some tiny, some big.

Right now my kitchen counter is an irritant of minor consequence but major annoyance. The counter is covered with crap, even though I’ve complained loudly to the cleanup crew (me). My kitchen, when buffed up, is such a lustrous pearl I wonder why I don’t do it every night.

A scratchier problem with greater consequences is that I promised myself yearss ago that I would write a book. At my last astrology readying, Ginny (my astrologer - a great one if you need one) said if I didn’t do it soon I’d be on to other things. The stars were right for writing NOW, she said.

Over the years possible subjects on which I could have written a best-seller for sure came and went with regularity. I won’t bore you with all the brilliant ideas I’ve had that died still-born. Some were just a concept, others went as far as a couple dozen neatly labeled (but mostly empty) file folders.

The closest I got to a full book was one about my trip across America in my minivan with my standard poodle, Molly. You know — Travels with Molly — just like Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley. Except instead of being written by one of America’s greatest writers, it would be written by me, freshly separated from my husband of 20 years.

I had already laid down the spine of the story in the form of the 30 chatty field dispatches I emailed home every couple of nights during that 9-week journey. But once I got home I bought a house and began remodeling it. By the time the house project was done, the trip book felt stale, stale, stale.

So. Here I am again. How to create a Pearl around this irritant of the Promise I made to myself to Publish a book? Perseverance is a Problem for me. Procrastination is another. I’ve got my standard of Perfection. How do I share my ideas for Posterity without Pontificating? Finally, a book requires a writer to have a daily writing Practice.

Maybe you can see where I’m going with this. I said to myself, why don’t I blog about my blocks? The responsibility of daily Posting, even if nobody reads it, is what I need.

See you tomorrow.

The letter P has been part of the alphabet since its early days in ancient Rome. It is the 16^th of 26 letters.

The P I love exPLODES from the lips with a satisfying POP.

Although many of you are no doubt big phans of the F sound that P can assume when married to an H, F-sounding P-words are not phine phor me and I’m restricting this book to popping P words.

Last month at a Toastmasters leadership training I heard a talk about ways to get new members. The speaker had five main points, all beginning with P so we would remember them. So much for mnemonics; all that stuck with me was her fifth word, Phun. It was supposed to be phunny but I thought it was stupid. Right then and there I decided no Ph/F words in my book of P.

While we’re at it, I’m not going to use P words that sound like S (pseudonyn and its friends) or T (pteradactyl and those creatures) or N (pneumonia and pneumatic). If you like them, start your own blog.

In the world of phonetics, P is an oral consonant, which means that in saying P, air is allowed to escape through the mouth. Technically it is a voiceless bilabial plosive. What does that mean?

• Voiceless – produced without vibrations of the vocal cords (a phonation type).
• Bilabial – articulated with both lips (place of articulation)
• Plosive – produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal trac – a stop (manner of articulation).

Is this more than you ever wanted to know about the letter P?

One day I was procrastinating (as usual) on a writing assignment and feeling pissed at myself for failing to persist with a regular writing practice. If I didn’t put pen to paper, what peerless prose would be left to posterity? And what was my purpose on the planet anyway if not to pontificate?

And then it struck me that my problems all began with the letter P.

I know a continuously curious gal named Goody Cable (owner of the literary Sylvia Beach Hotel in Newport, Oregon and the Rimsky-Korskoffee Coffee House in Portland) who recently spent 52 weeks - an entire year - exploring the alphabet, each letter for two weeks. She pored over the unabridged dictionary and immersed herself sequentially in each letter. She pondered the personality of each letter as discerned from the words it initiated. She didn’t just read and think about the words; she ate foods that began with the letter, wore colors that began with the letter, read books and listened to music by people whose name began with the letter, called old friends whose name began with that letter, and on and on. Every two weeks her perspective on reality shifted.

Her project totally tickled my imagination. But 26 letters is 25 too many for me. Since I was finding P words so problematic, why couldn’t I just explore the letter P? The good news is that many P words are not ponderous at all. Think pipsqueak, poodle, pumpernickel, pablum, penguin and pusillanimous.

This could be fun.