I am certainly late to the formal announcement of my word for 2021. But, it's not that I haven't had one, or don't continue to think about it. I even used a form of it already in a text, and found myself grinning with affirmation. Prospect (v; n) Oddly, I had thought of the verb form first. Maybe it was subconsciously taking root after bingeing on movies over the holidays. (One day, I'll get back to a time of weekend movie marathons. 2020 was not enough of an excuse to catch up on cinema.) There Will Be Blood opened with the scene of a single gentleman prospector, deep in his hand-hewn vertical shaft of rock and earth, picking his way to a few shavings of gold. The scene played long, beyond my comfort level, in that the way it was shot amplified the riskiness. Do I plan to prospect for gold? No. At least, not in the traditional, metallic sense. The word is not just exploring, but probing. Not just surveying, but looking deep with the intent to see the makeup of som...
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