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Verbivores in mourning

August 2, 2007 - 12:56 pm
by Kelly Davis

As tribute to A Way With Words (which, KPBS announced yesterday, has, in addition to the TV show Full Focus, been canceled), a word to add to your vocabulary:

HOMOCHROMOUS, an adjective meaning to be all of one color, used most often to refer to a flower, but I permit you to use it any way you want, such as, “My brunette friend spends so much time at the tanning salon, she’s beginning to look homochromous,” or “For dinner we ate carrots, yams and Cheetos; it was quite a homochromous meal.”

If you’re upset about the shows’ cancellations, you might enjoy taking a look at the reader comments here.

8 Comments leave one →
  1. August 2, 2007 - 3:06 pm 3:06 pm

    Sad, it was the only local centric focused video news, and it was in Hi-Def! I read it cost $1Million a year, which isn’t obscene by any stretch, but they could do an online only version without the fancy cameras and use the money to pay for journalists. Who watches TV anymore anyway?

  2. Ursula permalink
    August 2, 2007 - 3:28 pm 3:28 pm

    Am I understanding that there will no longer be an Editor’s Roundtable as well as the loss of Full Focus and A Way With Words?

    Now I remember why I stopped subscribing to KPBS and became a member of KCRW.

  3. Eric Wolff permalink
    August 2, 2007 - 3:47 pm 3:47 pm

    You know, a verbivore always sounded to me like someone who eats verbs. I don’t like it. Verbs are not at all filling. How about Etymophilia? Or etymaphone? Oooh, I like that. I’m an etymaphone!

  4. edwin decker permalink
    August 2, 2007 - 6:57 pm 6:57 pm

    how about a verbophile then. Verbophiles do not eat verbs out of their great, unduring love for them. Eating verbs, to the verbophile, would be very, very wrong.

  5. d.a. kolodenko permalink
    August 3, 2007 - 11:00 am 11:00 am

    How about verbophobe? A life without verbs. Unimaginable.
    Like a life without that lame but already missed show.

  6. August 3, 2007 - 6:06 pm 6:06 pm

    Not to worry, word lovers. There’s a lot going on behind the scenes, and we here at “A Way with Words” are very excited about the future of this show. You can keep up with the latest developments at our new site, http://www.waywordradio.org. Please stop by and sign up for our newsletter!

  7. August 4, 2007 - 5:59 am 5:59 am

    Yeah, Martha and I have talked about things other than “verbivores.” It’s a toughy. What about:

    palabristo
    lex wreck
    logomacher
    writersnipe
    grammarsnipe
    lexicophage
    morpheme fiend
    lexeme-lover
    lexemist
    glossolalian
    wordinista

    No? Probably not.

  8. Anonymous permalink
    August 7, 2007 - 9:33 am 9:33 am

    See, that’s why Grant is such an improvement on Richard Ledderererererer. Lots of good contenders on that list. I think I like wordinista best, though it sounds much nastier than the fairly permissive environment of A Way with Words.

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