MoeJoe Musing

Valentine’s Foolishness With Words: Ovation February 18, 2016

Hello and welcome to “Foolishness With Words,” the blog where I take a concept and tickle it to laughter and utter senselessness.  Today’s word is “ovation.”  Ovation, you all know, is a spontaneous outpouring of applause.  What you may not know are the limits of my folly as I dissect such a word.  Fair warning.

Here is the definition from Dictionary.Reference.com.  I took the word, thinking it would work like gestation (the process of gestating, to gestate) or like oration (the process of orating, to orate), and thought, until I looked it up, that ovate might be the root English verb.  If it followed the pattern, ovate should mean, “to applaud.”  But no.

Ovate means “egg shaped.”

But the roots of ovation, says the website above, are:

Origin-   from Latin ovātiō rejoicing, from ovāre to exult.

Anyone else looking at ovāre and seeing something a little too similar to “ovary?” Hmmm. ‘haps I wasn’t far off in drawing a parallel.

I love eggs.  Are we supposed to celebrate the egg, or the hatching, or the hatchling?  Or, the chicken.  Or, the female in general, whatever the species?

I didn’t write anything for Valentine’s day, but if I did, it would be something celebrating my favorite female, my wife.  She’s the best, the pinnacle of God’s creation, and if anyone is worthy of a standing ovation, it is she.  When we’re all treating each other nicely, I celebrate her, and her “hatchlings.”

(Also, I celebrate that she’s not egg shaped, but rather, more complicated.)