unpalatable
abhorrent nauseating
and contemptible

Yesterday, January 18th, was National Thesaurus Day and it honors Peter Mark Roget, the author of Roget’s Thesaurus, who was born on this day in 1779.

According to The National Day Calendar website:

In 1840, Roget retired from a successful career in medicine and spent the rest of his life working on Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases. The work was the result of decades of collecting lists of words and categorizing them, much like a scientist would collect specimens. In Roget’s case, he collected words. He first published his thesaurus in 1852. And it was more than a book of synonyms – it was a complete categorization and organization of each word by meaning. 

Since then, poets and writers have used the thesaurus to help make their writing come to life. However, the thesaurus also has its detractors. Some say the thesaurus weakens language and destroys it. 

Whether you are looking for a more accurate word or trying to improve your writing, the thesaurus can be your best friend. Expanding your vocabulary increases both written and spoken communication skills, creative writing abilities, and can be helpful in advancing your career.

I have to mention that on their official BlueSky account, those good folks at Merriam Webster posted:

Today is National Thesaurus Day.

Personally, we find these made-up holidays contemptible, abhorrent, nauseating, repugnant, and unpalatable.

I loved that.

My only question?

Did those good folks at Merriam Webster use a thesaurus to find the words, contemptible, abhorrent, nauseating, repugnant, and unpalatable?

age is an issue …
mind over matter – don’t mind …
it doesn’t matter

Check the world wide web and ask who said, Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter, and you will find lots of those meme graphics that attribute the saying to Mr. Mark Twain.

But ask for a citation and you go down that rabbit hole that conveys the information super highway to nether regions of obscurity.

I turned to my favorite website for attribution, Quote Investigator, to learn that the first recorded use of “Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter” was in in 1968 and Mark Twain, died in 1910.

According to Quote Investigator, the earliest evidence appeared in an article about aging that was published in multiple newspapers in 1968. The saying was attributed to an anonymous scientific researcher. The prefatory phrase was somewhat shorter:

As one government researcher puts it: “Aging is a matter of mind. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”

That line, according to QI appeared in the June 28 1968 , Statesville Record and Landmark, in a story headlined Facts Listed On Aging (Quote Page 7-A, Statesville, North Carolina).

Once, said, the line took on a life of its own and it appeared in print over and over through the years, attributed to Jack Benny, Satchel Paige and Muhammad Ali as well as Mr. Twain.

Just think of what you could get away back when attribution of almost anything wasn’t a few clicks away.

Regardless or iregardless* of who said it, I say it again, Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter and I am saying it to say, Happy Birthday today to my wife.

I hope you don’t mind and it doesn’t matter to me as we battle that issue of mind over matter together.

Love you!

*Use regardless, as irregardless is a nonstandard, redundant word considered incorrect in formal writing, though dictionaries acknowledge its usage to mean the same as “regardless” (despite everything) due to a double negative (ir- + -less) and confusion with “irrespective”. While some find “irregardless” acceptable in very informal speech, sticking to “regardless” avoids criticism and ensures clarity in professional or academic settings, as it’s the universally accepted, standard term, but I digress.

much emotional
content occurs before we
are nineteen, twenty

Probably everyone feels this on their first true flight from whatever nest, but it is no less real for being so universally shared!

We all have mothers and fathers, and what sweet anguish, sometimes terror, there is in those names.

If you give it much thought, the skeleton of life is stupendously ordinary.

So much of the emotional content of our lives seems to occur before we are nineteen or twenty, doesn’t it?

After that, especially by our age, we seem like stone walls, mortared together by scar tissue.

The whole point is not to be.

From all my reading done in construction camps throughout the world, the main point or challenge is to stay as conscious as possible, absurd as that seems.

Sundog: a novel : the story of an American foreman, Robert Corvus Strang, as told to Jim Harrison by Jim Harrison (Washington Square Press: New York, 1989).

I guess I mean this
if lived well … then just as true …
is the peace you feel

Adapted from the book, I See You’ve Called in Dead – A Novel by John Kenney (Zibby Publishing: New York, 2025), where Mr. Kenney writes: (Tim, the landlord and friend of Bud, the hero of the novel, is speaking)

I don’t really know what I mean either.

I guess I mean this.

That at the end — and I’ve had the privilege to be in the room with a few people now, my parents, two friends—I think, and it’s just a guess, but I think we let go of everything and the true nature of experience falls over us.

This … miracle that is existence.

Which we layer with so much.

With anxiety and fear and greed and smallness and what’s next and hurry up and I’ve got a meeting and all the … stuff … that gets in the way.

I’m not saying we should all go live like a monk.

I’m saying that if you haven’t lived the life you want, if you haven’t loved life, then at the end, I think a deep and very sad regret comes over you.

But if you have, if you’ve lived well … friends and family and … if you’ve lived … then just as true is the peace you feel. I’ve seen it.

Does this make any sense or do I sound mad?

With anxiety and fear and greed and smallness and what’s next and hurry up and I’ve got a meeting and all the … stuff … that gets in the way.

Does this make any sense or do I sound mad?

Mad, not meaning angry but crazy.

I think the passage makes, if anything, too much sense.

Maybe that’s the craziest part of the passage.

The Moth and the Star

A young and impressionable moth once set his heart on a certain star. He told his mother about this and she counseled him to set his heart on a bridge lamp instead. “Stars aren’t the thing to hang around,” she said; “lamps are the thing to hang around.” “You get somewhere that way,” said the moth’s father. “You don’t get anywhere chasing stars.” But the moth would not heed the words of either parent. Every evening at dusk when the star came out he would start flying toward it and every morning at dawn he would crawl back home worn out with his vain endeavor. One day his father said to him, “You haven’t burned a wing in months, boy, and it looks to me as if you were never going to. All your brothers have been badly burned flying around street lamps and all your sisters have been terribly singed flying around house lamps. Come on, now, get out of here and get yourself scorched! A big strapping moth like you without a mark on him!”

The moth left his father’s house, but he would not fly around street lamps and he would not fly around house lamps. He went right on trying to reach the star, which was four and one-third light years, or twenty-five trillion miles, away. The moth thought it was just caught up in the top branches of an elm. He never did reach the star, but he went right on trying, night after night, and when he was a very, very old moth he began to think that he really had reached the star and he went around saying so. This gave him a deep and lasting pleasure, and he lived to a great old age. His parents and his brothers and his sisters had all been burned to death when they were quite young.

Moral: Who flies afar from the sphere of our sorrow is here today and here tomorrow.