New word: concatenate

I wonder about a lot of things - hence the name of this blog. Pretty much every time I come across a word that is unfamiliar to me, I wonder what it means. Word nerd that I am, I put an icon for dictionary.com on my desktop so that I can look things up easily and immediately. Before the days of the internets, my kids would chuckle to see me get up and head for the big book. They really gave me a hard time when I designated a spot to keep the dictionary in the kitchen, right next to the table where it would be handy. But now in this modern era I can stay in my chair and let my fingers do the walking - meaning that I don't get much physical exercise with my mental activity. I don't always remember the definition, but the discovery is still fun.

An article caught my attention tonight because it was about beads in a bead shop. I am fascinated by the art of jewelry-making and have been collecting the components for this as a hobby. I was in a bead shop the other day and remembering that some shops offer classes. Sounds like fun to me.

The writer was telling about going into the shop and collecting choice beads in a little muffin cup and beginning to imagine "what dazzling concatenations might emerge from fashioning piles of beads into stunning pieces of jewelry." How lovely that sounded and I began to imagine what "concatenations" might be. So I clicked on my dictionary to find out. To concatenate is to link together, to unite as in a chain. A concatenation is a series of interconnected or interdependent things or events. Cool.

Turns out that she was comparing the beads to words and the dazzling concatenations would be the writing that happens when you put words together in the most pleasing way.