You know those “wordle” thingies? Where you put a piece of text into a box on the internet and the internet makes you a picture with the most frequent words largest? This morning I was imagining a version where you rate each word in a piece of text according to the strength of the emotional reaction it elicits, and then the most striking (not necessarily in a bad way) words are the biggest. One word that really struck me in a recently received email was “crestfallen”…it keeps coming back to me (it would be very big in the emo-wordle), and finally today I wondered: which kind of crest, and fallen how? I see two chief options:
And…it’s the droopy one! Not the precipitous-droppy one.
interlexionality 