Blackketter Dictionary

I should start this post by noting I have wonderful loving parents and I grew up in a very supportive home. However, my parents believed that one of their jobs as parents was to mess with their children's minds. Take for instance Ogday. What is Ogday you may ask? Well when my sister was little we were listening to the Beatles song "Eight Days a Week" and she asked my father what the eighth day of the week was to which he replied "Ogday." The next question of course was well when is Ogday. Now there is some debate as to exactly when Ogday is but it falls sometime between either Tuesday and Wednesday or Thursday and Friday. Why have you never experienced an Ogday, well you've slept through it of course. These were my parent's explanations to Ogday. Furthermore, when we said the days of the week if we left out Ogday dad would say we forgot it, but if we said the days of the week with Ogday we would either be told we put it at the wrong spot or there is no such thing as Ogday. See, my parents were truly warped.

Another wonderful addition to my vocabulary was the word ootz. What is an ootz? Well it's a piece of an orange that you get when you peel an orange and pull all the little slices apart. One slice is an ootz. This is one of the words that was just accepted in my family. If you offered someone a bite of your orange it was an ootz. In fact I believed this was just the term to use until I was in college (yeah you heard that right) when I offered my roommate and ootz to which she replied "what is an ootz?" I was quite sure this was a real word so I searched high and low only to discovered I had yet again been hoodwinked by my parents. However, I continue to use this word and have introduced many a person, including Clay, to the term ootz.

So last night Clay and I were talking and I mentioned I had a great orange yesterday and he then asked me "well how would you spell ootz?" This had never really occurred to me. I figured I would spell it "ootz", but since this is a made up word perhaps there are alternate spellings. Maybe it's spell "utz" or "outz" or "uts" or "uuts". Who knows? I've never made up the spelling of a word before. This got me thinking the first people to encounter the "how would you spell this" problem would have been the Egyptians. I'm sure it went something like this:

"How would you spell 'Pharaoh'?"
"I don't know, maybe we use a osprey symbol?"
"What about a circle?"
"Sure that looks good."

So, since the ootz issue has never really been settled I believe the proper spelling is "ootz." However, I would like to point out that "Ogday" is spelled correctly. I know this because may mom named her blog "Ogday in Montana" and since she was the first to create an official spelling she gets to spell it "Ogday".

P.S. I am lobbying to get "ootz" into the dictionary so please feel free to use this in your daily vocabulary in order to spread the word!