I do most of my prewriting by hand, and much of my work this week involved exploring the concept of “death” – which I keep adding the letter “l” to and writing as dealth. I looked up “dealth” and learned it is an obsolete word meaning “a share dealt out.”

Obsolete words are such a romantic thing, reinforcing the idea of language being a living thing. The word “obsolete” itself was the first vocabulary word-of-the-day (we called them “Super Words”) we had back in sixth grade. Tip of the hat to Mrs. Proctor, and no, I don’t remember what the other 179 words were.

Which is all just to say that I fell down a few rabbit holes this week.