P52, Somewhat: Week 2, "Perfect"

So, I have hit upon the most perfect idea for this week's P52 post!

My secret addiction is crossword puzzles.  Most people don't know, but I do them all the time.  I do them online, in magazines, and in the newspaper.  One of the teachers I work with even bought me an entire book of them for Christmas!  I like the easy ones and the more challenging ones.  And I've been addicted since about my senior year of high school.

By the age of 15, I was writing all the time.  I wrote short stories, poems, journals, letters, word puns.  I wrote, and I filled folders and notebooks full of these writings.  The more I wrote, the more I wanted to write.  And as I wrote, I developed a fascination for words.  So I began to learn new words: short or long, impressive, obscure, words with odd spellings, even a few "q"-without"u" words.

Not only did my increased vocabulary begin to make my writing more interesting, it also made me great at solving word puzzles.  My senior year of high school, I took a fluff-type class, 1st period all year, called Contemporary History.  Basically, we had one of the coolest, ridiculously-intelligent men on the planet teaching the class, and we sat around reading the most current newspapers and news magazines and discussing world events and politics.  Most of the students in the class were seniors like I was, and we'd all sit around like the almost-adults we were drinking coffee and eating breakfast snacks and reading the paper, all the while having rather advance teacher-led discussions about what was going on in the world around us.

During the year in Contemporary History, I made friends with another student who was also a lexophile* and together we would work the puzzles in each day's newspaper: 2 crossword puzzles, the Jumble, and the CryptoQuote.  It was our "thing" and everyone knew it.  Now, as every crossword addict knows, as you get into working harder and harder puzzles, you're going to run into clues for which you have no answer.  For those times, there are books similar to Thesauruses designed just for puzzle lovers.  You look up a key word in the clue, and hints are sorted based on the number of letters or spaces you need to fill.  Need a five-letter word for "mad"? How about "irate"?

Some words, as every lexophile* knows, have lots and lots of synonyms.  Perfect is one such word.  In fact, in my crossword puzzle dictionary, there are over 200 synonyms given for "perfect."  So, while perfect may not mean exactly the same thing to every person, there is certainly a "perfect" synonym to compliment your vocabulary!

And, after all, what is a writer without words?

"Perfect...In Other Words" - photographed by Sarah Getz, January 6, 2012 for P52.

*Lexophile: A lover of words, especially in word games, puzzles, anagrams, palindromes, etc.