My crowning moment in word serendipity is seared into my brain. I was thumbing through Paul Hellweg's Insomniac's Dictionary when I stumbled upon the word resistentialism, which Hellweg defines as "seemingly spiteful behavior manifested by inanimate objects."

Reading that definition, I had what can only be described as a revelation. I felt that an entire category of my experience had been uplifted from the Cimmerian realm of the Inexpressible into the clear, comforting light of the Known.

Here, at last, was a word for the rug that quietly curls up so it can snag your toe, the sock gone AWOL from the dryer, the slippery piece of toast that always hits the floor jelly side down. Here, at last, was the word that explained the countless insolent acts of things, especially the infuriating intractability of plastic wrap.

"Resistentialism" -- a lovely word.

I never finished reading Edward Tenner's books Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences, but from what I remember of what I read, it was all about the resistenialistic properties of things.

And speaking of words, someone used a word in rehearsal the other day that I've never heard pronounced, only (and very rarely) seen in print: deliquesce, meaning to melt away, or to disappear as if by melting. It's lovely sounding word which doesn't give up its meaning as readily when spoken as it does on the page -- which is quite possibly the reason that it was cut from an earlier draft of the play we're working on. (Plays, of course, being primarily designed for hearing and not so much for reading.)

I think I first came across the word "deliquesce" in J.G. Ballard's early disaster SF novel The Crystal World, in which a part of the African interior mysteriously begins to crystalize, and the crystalization slowly spreads, sort of like Vonnegut's Ice-9 in super-duper slow-mo. (Ballard at that time was writing novels in which the world was taken over by desert or the ocean or some other ecological or physical state.) At one point the crystals start to melt and Ballard used "deliquesce" more than once in telling that part of the story.

And speaking of Ballard, his new novel, Millennium People awaits my attention...