“Nifty,” Jeff said.

I thought about it.  “That’s a good word.”

“I know.  It should be the word of the week.”

“Word of the week?”

“Yeah.  When I lived in Kentucky, I always had a word of the week and tried to use it as often as possible in conversation.”

“Oh.”  It was almost too easy.  “That’s a nifty idea.”

“Hey, you’re catching on.”

“So if we use ‘nifty’ as the word for this week, what should next week’s word be?  Or would that be making plans too far in advance?”

“No, it’s not too early to decide.  I’ll tell you one I had a lot of fun with in Kentucky.  ‘Hark.’  I’d kind of like to use it again.”

“Hark.”

“Yeah, you can use it all the time.  You see something or something happens, you just let out with a ‘hark.’”

As an interjection, “hark” did sound hard to beat.  “How about the word for the week after that?”

That took some thinking.  ‘Smock’ was proposed but quickly rejected.  ‘Loquacious’ was seriously considered, as was ‘ostentatious.’  Two other interjections, ‘zoinks’ and ‘jinkies’ (familiar to any kid who watched Saturday morning TV in the early 70s or The Cartoon Network in the 90s), were also batted around, but we continued to think about it, not wanting to be hasty in making so important a decision.

“Pentimento,” I said finally.

Jeff repeated it, crinkling his brow and compressing his mouth into a thin slit that came close to circling his head.  “Good word.  I’m not sure what it means, but it’s a good word.”

I wouldn’t have known what it meant either if I hadn’t heard it on an old Night Court rerun, but I didn’t tell Jeff that.  I did tell him that pentimento refers to the reappearance, in a work of fine art, of a design that had been painted over. 

“Oh,” said Jeff, not sounding nearly as impressed by my knowledge of artistic terms as I thought he should’ve been.  “Well, that’s nice to know, but I don’t think it should be a word of the week.” 

I felt very strongly about pentimento, so I didn’t give in easily, but Jeff’s reasoning finally won out.  It would hardly be appropriate, he told me, for the chosen word to be so obscure that we couldn’t find opportunity to use it in conversation.  And a person doesn’t really see enough things with reemerging features that had once been obliterated by a new outward appearance to go around talking about pentimento all the time. 

Furthermore, to force the word into conversations or to use it out of context shouldn’t even be considered.  To do otherwise, as my friend Jeff put it, would be perpetrating a foolish facade, which is, in itself, a nifty little bit of alliteration.

So is “awful, artificial and amusing,” which is what King James II of England said when he saw Sir Christopher Wren’s designs for Saint Paul’s Cathedral. Wren, one of the most gifted and learned men of his time, was a professor of astronomy at Gresham College and Oxford and a founder of the Royal Society, and he drew up the plans for rebuilding London after the great fire of 1666.  Saint Paul’s is an architectural masterpiece. 

But you’d think the king hated it.  “Awful, artificial and amusing,” he said.  That was actually high praise.  Three hundred and fifty years ago, ‘awful’ meant that something was worthy of reverence and wonder, “amusing” meant the same thing as “amazing,” and if something was artificial, it was designed with skill and ingenuity.

Which goes to show how far some words have come from their original meanings.  Although I can’t help wondering what Sir Christopher Wren would’ve thought if King James had said “nifty” instead of  “awful, artificial and amusing.”