Tomorrow it will be time to tear more frags but I still haven’t written about the frags I tore last week. It’s been that kind of week.

Prosperous is an element. It is the mystical cousin of phosphorus. Rather than a chemical element with an atomic number it is a supernatural element with dead-language glyphs. Like phosphorus, prosperous is highly reactive and luminous. Plentiful, natural, and free.

Mysterious is the union of My and Sterious.  Sterious is a word English scholars have not grown the balls to define but sterious is a thing. It is real. I shall define it for you without the benefit of testicles. Sterious is defined as the gut-knowing, bone-deep certainty that something, such as a concept, condition, or experience, can only make sense to the individual who discovers it, creates it, or experiences it. This is why there is no Your Sterious or Our Sterious, there is only My Sterious. It only makes sense to me. When it only makes sense to you it is your My Sterious. The English language is uncomfortable with this, so to quash the whole relative-to-one’s-one-experience-and-therefore-difficult-to-define-universally business, they just slammed My and Sterious together to create a word to describe sterious, which is Mysterious. But don’t be deceived. Sterious may be mysterious but you know it when you feel it.

Openness is a rank of royalty. It is a title. Think duchess or princess or empress. Emphasis is placed on the second syllable to produce O-PEN-ness, with the O functioning much like the Irish O. And it is o-PEN (pehn), not o-pin, and not o-pun. Talk right, dammit. The proper presentation of the title is therefore OPenness but the double capitals have fallen out of fashion, leaving us with the more modern Openness.

Powerful is one of the gifts left in the Wizard of Oz’s giant sack of denouement because Robert Palmer had not yet written the song Simply Irresistible when the movie was made. Everyone treats this as if it is a love song about a woman but it’s really a song about loving words. Only a wordsmith writes those lyrics, people. Read them sometime. Read them now. This is a song about loving language. The songwriter (Mr. Palmer) was obviously as titillated by words and language as I am. Didn’t mean to turn me on? Oh, yes you did. You most certainly did. The Wizard had a bandolier down in the bottom of that bag embroidered with the word Powerful on it to present to Mr. Palmer as an award and incentive to continue his love affair with words for the benefit of us all. I assume it was given to him posthumously in a private ceremony so that no one would try to make a cheesy musical about it.

Tomorrow I tear more frags. Wait with me and enjoy these in the meantime.

— Mercy