Words of the day

This morning I was trying to put together a piece of work known in academia as a research statement. Akin to a cover letter in a normal job search, a research statement gives employers in academia a sense of what you've done and where you're going with a bit more personality than you can get across in your curriculum vitae which, by the way, is what the rest of the world would call a resume. Leave it to people in academia to use unnecessary Latin.

Anyway, I'd hit a wall. Literally, I was doing the Jack Nicholson thing from The Shining, you know, where he types pages and pages of the same thing: "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy". Except in my case it was something like "In order for the immune system to respond specifically to pathogens, it must first be able to identify pathogens as foreign." Over and over again, down the screen. You could have walked in on me, looked at my laptop screen, and given me the Shelley Duvall reaction:


Somewhere between staring off into space and staring at the screen, I got to thinking about old Christians. Seeking inspiration they'd flip open the Bible to some random page, plunk a finger down, and see what passage came up. Whammo, instant inspiration! The divine equivalent of ramen noodles. In medieval times (not Medieval Times), people would do the same with Virgil's Aeneid. There's even a word for this kind of thing: bibliomancy.

But what's the equivalent for me, 21st-century Stew? Where's my inspiration?

Then it hit me: "word of the day". Put some random element in the writing. Couldn't hurt.

Googling "word of the day" brought up -- no surprise here -- lots of hits. The top five sites had these gems:

"Inexorable" from dictionary.com -- "not to be persuaded or moved by entreaty or prayer"

"Cozen" from m-w.com -- "to deceive, win over, or induce to do something by artful coaxing"

"Albatross" from wordsmith.org -- "any of the Diomedeidae family of large, web-footed seabirds"

"Sandboard" from oed.com -- "a board or tray sprinkled with sand in which numbers, letters, diagrams, etc. can be traced or obliterated, often used as a teaching aid"

"Exuberant" from nytimes.com -- "extreme or excessive in degree, size, or extent"

Hmmm....

"I tried to cozen the exuberant albatross from my sandboard -- 'Shoo!' I said -- but it was inexorable." Well, that doesn't sound like it belongs in a research statement.

"I cozened my cousin into getting me a new sandboard, but he said exuberantly, 'The albatross is inexorable.'" Oh my God, I thought, I really have gone crazy.

UPDATE (12:40 pm, 11/16): By the way, you can dabble in some bibliomancy for yourself by going to one of the random Bible verse generators online. I prefer this one because it seems to include the Old Testament as well. Or, for a more secular experience you can just consult a random word generator like this one. I got "calculates". What did you get?

UPDATE 2 (11:50 pm, 11/16): Flickr fans might be interested to know that one of the site's co-founders has done some bibliomancy herself. Like mom used to say, if you can't be creative, at least be in good company. (No, she didn't really say that.)