i am neurotic

i am neurotic is a place for you to confess your neuroses (including, apparently, a morbid fear of capital letters). A sampling:

When I have to ask for directions and the location is fairly obvious, I’m always embarrassed. To avoid the humiliation, I ask in a British accent so my incompetence is socially accepted.

And:

I can’t stand multiple bumps close together. Corn on the cob, multiple pimples, popcornceilings… anything with multiple bumps. They seriously freak me out.

And I especially like:

When I was little, I would apologize to my stuffed animals if I dropped them or something, so they wouldn’t kill me in my sleep. I also tried to evenly divide my attention among them so no one got lonely or jealous, and tried to kill me in my sleep.

I have my own linguistic neuroses, of course, but I'm not sharing. How about yours?

A Book You Can Really Dig

The good folks at iUniverse, which provides affordable publishing, editorial, and marketing services, are featuring my book, A Garden of Words, on their site. There you'll also find a recent podcast interview I did with them about the book, which is about how flowers got their names -- as well as how many other words came to be. In the podcast, we also discuss our radio show, plus a little about the craft of writing, and getting published.

We at "A Way with Words" are proud to have iUniverse as a sponsor of our show, and I'm pleased to say they've done a great job re-publishing my book.

Dah Dah DUH

As Shpilkes points out, it's hard to know what the naming consultants at Volkswagen were thinking when they named their new models Touareg, Tiguan, and Routan.

I can't help wondering if Touareg is some kind of anagram. ("Outrage"? "Age Rout"? "A Toe Rug"?)

Btw, how did I miss until just this instant that there's a Microsoft version of that old VW commercial that uses the "Dah Dah Dah" song?