Fernweh

I like to look up what words mean.  Conversely,  I hated it as a child and teenager.  My least favorite response of those formative years, usually spoken by my dad, when I asked what a word meant was "Look it up in the dictionary."  If I needed to know badly enough, I would trudge over to the 1940's bookcase, pull open the sticking door, and pull out the red-covered Webster.  Flipping through the onionskin-thin pages, I would eventually find what I was looking for, and would probably find the definitions to a few more words I had stored up on a mental list as well.

What I'm not sure of is where the shift between hating the words and loving the words came.  Was it from the competition in my literature classes in college to sound equally as smart as all of those know-it-alls we all hated...OK, were jealous of...in high school that were now in ALL of my classes?  Was it the desire to find different words so as not to sound redundant in the million and one essays I had to write?  Was it to prove to the professors that I did know enough to be at an institution of higher learning even though my last three essays were disappointing at best?  Writing poetry for a creative writing class and diving in to a thesaurus to find the perfect word to replace the mundane, but needing to make sure the word I chose was the one I really wanted?  I can't say.  Maybe it was developed a little bit by all of them.  But whatever the reason, I'm not ashamed to say that my parents taught me so.  I wish I now had in my own possession that faded canvas covered dictionary that is slightly beat-up from use.  

This brings me to the term Wanderlust.  It's a German word that gets used in America to describe the desire to travel and explore.  It's literal translation means to enjoy hiking.  What Wikipedia (hey, hold your snorts and snickers!) told me about it though was that the word is no longer used in Germany.  A new word has taken its place.  Fernweh: an ache for distance.  What wonderful words, both of them!  I wish the English language had its own equivalents, as I suffer from Wanderlust quite frequently now, and if it goes too long it turns into Fernweh.  Don't get me wrong - I love my home.  But the more I travel, the more I want to see.  Like my mental list of words I was saving to look up, I'm adding places to my travel list that I never really wanted to see before because my confidence and sense of adventure is expanding the more places I go.  Morocco, Thailand, Egypt, Kenya, the Netherlands and Denmark are all creeping up on Italy, Greece, D.C., and India.  I think I'm gonna need another job...