Apricity

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi, who’s this?

Hi, this is Joplin calling from Vermont.

Oh, hi Joplin, how you doing?

Good, just a little commotion here, but…

What’s going on?

Oh, I’m in school, I just let kids dismissing for the day.

You’re a teacher?

Kindergarten teacher, yeah.

Kindergarten, oh great, wonderful.

So you must run across all kinds of great language stories.

Oh boy, it’s crazy.

What do you got for us?

Oh, well, one of the rules in our class is when we’re reading aloud, if we come across a word that somebody doesn’t know, we have to stop and figure out what it means.

Oh, I love this man already.

Yeah, there we go.

Well, it makes read aloud sometimes slow.

Get a little lengthy, and we get off on tangents.

You’ve been reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar for six weeks now?

Right.

About that.

And then we keep this long list of words that we accumulate over the years.

That’s fantastic.

But, you know, I always ask to see if anyone either knows what the word means or maybe can figure it out from the context.

So one of my favorite stories is the day we were reading about Benjamin Franklin and came across the word victorious.

So I said, anybody know what victorious means?

And this one little girl raised her hand and said, yeah, that’s where my mom buys her underwear.

Victoria’s Secret.

Nice.

That is fantastic.

But I am always impressed with how kids, you know, we get these really bizarre words and they so often can figure them out just by, you know, using the context around them.

Yeah, that made perfect sense.

Bright minds.

I love it.

That’s wonderful.

Maybe not in that case.

That’s a great story.

Thank you for sharing that.

Did you have anything else, Joplin, you wanted to talk about?

Well, another thing that’s been on my mind is someone, we’re doing our, February is our fitness month, and we talk about all the things we need to stay healthy, one of which is vitamin D.

And we have this wonderful, these big windows in the hallway where the sun comes in.

So sometimes in the deep of winter, on a sunny day, we’ll go out and just sit there and absorb some vitamin D.

And someone introduced me to the word apricity, which I’d never heard before.

Apricity.

Oh, what a wonderful word. I love it.

And I went and looked it up, and it said it was obsolete.

And I said, well, what a shame. Such a great word. How could it be obsolete?

How would you define apricity?

Well, the definition I think I found was the radiance of the sun in the winter.

In the winter.

I’ve been telling everyone, oh, you know this word, great word, apricity.

You’ve got to tell everyone about it so we can get it back into use.

It’s such a great word.

A-P-R-I-C-I-T-Y. Yes?

Yes.

Okay.

Yes, I love this word.

I see it often used to describe faces, like much apricity of feature or apricity seemed to illumine her countenance.

That’s lovely.

That is lovely.

But if you think about somebody with a beaming face, literally, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I just love the idea of apricity being the warmth of sun in winter.

You know, there you are in the bleak midwinter, but you know what it feels like when you’re outside and it’s cold.

And I love the echo of April in that word because the green days are coming, right?

Yes.

Oh, okay.

That isn’t the etymology.

No, but it sounds like it.

Yeah, it sounds like it.

We’re reminded of this unrelated word.

That’s interesting that you’re free associating that way, because I’m thinking of the first part of the word being kind of heavy.

I don’t know, the A and the P, and then the isity is more, you know, it’s more delicate.

It comes from a Latin word that means pretty much the same thing, to lie open in the sun, to be heated by the sun.

Apricity.

But I’ve only seen it in 17th century writing.

We’ll relaunch that word, apricity.

Yes, help me get it out there.

A-P-R-I-C-I-T-Y.

Start using it, everybody.

Joplin says you should, and so do we.

Well, I see that apricity.com has been taken by a company in Scottsdale, unfortunately.

I was going to suggest that you buy the domain name.

Oh, yeah.

How can we publicize it besides the show?

Or is that what you’re doing right now?

I guess that’s what you’re doing right now.

Start using it, right?

Yeah, yeah.

We’ll put it out to all of our listeners and everyone who reads our newsletter, and put it on social media, and we’ll see if we can make it stick.

Have you tried it on your kindergartners?

I have, yeah.

I’ve always tried to get new words out there.

And are they using it?

Well, I don’t know if I’ve actually heard them use it, but I’ve certainly been using it with them.

So hopefully if they hear it enough times.

What is it?

You have to hear a word at least 25 times or something before?

That many?

Whoa.

Well, say it every day for a month there.

They should have it.

Thanks for calling.

Much appreciated.

And like we always say, teachers are doing the good work.

Keep it up, buddy.

Right on.

Putting old heads on young shoulders.

Bye-bye.

Okay, bye-bye.

Bye.

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