Lexiphile Exposed!

Lexiphile: what a creepy-sounding word.  AND, guess what?  A friend recently used it in an email…gulp…to define ME! 

Really?  Yes, REALLY.  It sounded suspicious and probably incriminating as well, starting with a sinister L-E-X. The very first thing that came to mind was Lex Luthor,  the fictitious power-hungry super villain and brilliant evil scientist who plots to kill Superman and dominate the world.  Verbalizing the name Lex sounds almost like a hissing snake: LEX-S-S-S-S-s-s-s-s-s….

And what of the rest of the word, the suffix “phile”?  Doesn’t that have to do with some sort of obsession or affinity to something?  Isn’t a word with “phile” in it rubbing elbows with a phobia?  Shudder.  A phobia with Lex Luthor.  I’m doomed.

This word, lexiphile, creeped me out, I tell you.  But alas, I’d been dubbed with a new title, and so felt compelled to verify its meaning.  Good or bad, I had to KNOW.

Google is such a good friend, and so quick to set things straight!  Thank-you Google, for always being at my fingertips – literally.  You explained to me that a lexiphile is not someone obsessed with Lex Luthor after all, but rather a person who is a lover of words and word-plays!  Ah.  The lex must come from a linguistics point of view.  Now I remember: the lexicon of a language is its vocabulary, including both words and expressions.

So.  Lexiphile.  Maybe that would be me after all.

Following is a list of sentences that might interest anyone reading this who might be flirting with lexiphilian tendancies:

The guy who fell onto an upholstery machine was fully re-covered.

Those who get too big for their britches will be exposed in the end.

You can tune a piano, but you can’t tuna fish.

I wondered why the baseball was getting bigger, then it hit me.

 To write with a broken pencil is pointless.

When fish are in schools they sometimes take debate.

A thief who stole a calendar got twelve months.

The professor discovered her theory of earthquakes was on shaky ground.

The batteries were given out free of charge.

After a dentist and a manicurist married, they fought tooth and nail.

A will is a dead give-away.

A boiled egg is hard to beat.

When you’ve seen one shopping center, you’ve seen a mall.

A bicycle can’t stand alone; it is two-tired.