Words are one of my most important resource at this point in my life.  Since I write, they are like spices in the kitchen cupboard.  You can't substitute pepper for nutmeg. 

Yesterday, I couldn't think of a word I wanted.  It was somewhere in my head,  tucked away in my memory--or I wouldn't have known it had gone missing.  Wouldn't have known it was lost. I go ballistic when that happens, when I can't find it.  If I didn't have that word in my repertoire, I wouldn't miss it. 

Compounded by the fact that I am the world's speller.  I went through a zillion variations of the word cupboard (first paragraph up there) before spell check could even make a stab at what I was wanting to say.  Cubbard?  Cubarrd?  Cubberd?  Cubhard?  It wasn't even in spell-check's repertoire.  I would never have started that word with a "cup"...because it doesn't sound like that when you say it.

Sometimes it's easier to substitute another word and go on.  Cabinet?  But I hate it when I am stumped for a word and spell check doesn't come to my rescue.

I recently read a book that had hundreds of words in it that I didn't know.  That rarely happens.  It was so bad, that I got a piece of paper and started writing the words I didn't know down.  There were over a hundred of them.  I wonder if that author uses those words in everyday conversation.  I wonder if he thought there were people out there who would persevere and finish his book.

It wasn't me.  I gave up--I "went to the cupboard and got my poor dog a bone." And without that poem, I wouldn't have even used the word cupboard.