I like Merriam-Webster’s word of the day. I follow along sometimes.

It’s part of a long list of stuff I do every day that probably even my best friends don’t know about. I wake up some days a little bit early so  I can read before I go to work, hang out with the cat and wake up slowly. I make the bed after I get home from work. I take lots of pictures. I actually floss my teeth.

And yeah, I like the dictionary’s word of the day.

Last Sunday, it was Scintillate. The origin is from the Latin word scintilla.

I originally giggled because it sounds like Synchilla. You know, the synthetic chinchilla fleece that Patagonia makes. It’s actually called that.

But no, scintilla means spark. I think it’s supposed to be literal, like a spark from some flint.

I’m going to JK Rowling this word. She used all sort of Latin words to come up with her spells, probably most famously “Avada Kedavra”, which means, “I destroy as I speak” – the inverse to the infamous “Abracadabra”, which actually roughly translates to “I create as I speak”. Cool, huh?

Scintilla, a spark of knowing, of creation. If you were to mutter it as an incantation, perhaps a small glitter of light would stretch briefly to you, so quick that maybe it didn’t even happen.

That’s kind of like inspiration, right? It’s so fast that if you miss it, you’ll forget about it. If you catch it, you move so quickly towards creation that you forget it took a little spark to get anything going at all.

Scintilla. I think if even the word itself sparked my imagination, think of all the inspiration that’s out there for the taking if we’re just observant enough to see it and quick enough to catch it.