You write such pretty words, but life's no storybook

I like words. This isn't really surprising, I don't think.

But it's worth specification. A love of words can be misconstrued as a love of making other people feel stupid, or conversely, a love of making yourself sound misleadingly smart. For some people, it might also be a love of euphemism; there's fun to be had in being able to say exactly what you mean without directly saying anything at all. But what I personally love most about words is the most basic thing about them: their ability to mean something.

Despite what the more fascist dictionary adherents lead us to believe, words are not fixed signifiers. They change constantly. They have a limited flexibility in immediate contexts and a nearly infinite ability to reshape themselves across time. This means that most words have generations of layers (like onions or Shrek) underlying them. Enduring the nerdy peeling process and uncovering old definitions or uses often gives words spectral dimension, which adds a scholarly lemony zest to your reading experiences.

For example: the word disaster
If you pick at it, disaster is comprised of two basic roots: the classic prefix dis- (meaning "not" or "un" or other negating terms) and astr, the same root that brings us words like astronaut and astronomy. It means "star". In pre-scientific times, people believed that their lives were fated by the alignment of planets and stars. So if a person meets disaster, they are ill-starred--unfavorably fated by the celestial stuff that apparently hates them.

Isn't that interesting?

Also: the word tradition, as well as the word trade, derive (unsurprisingly) from the same French origin word meaning "delivery" or "handing down". This Old French word (traison) is also the root of the word treason. So one word associated with nationalism and another word that designates a betrayal of national ties are linguistically derived from the same asexual parent.

It's interesting.

It also, in my opinion, makes your reading more meaningful. In both senses of the term.