Well, it's been a good two years... Probably about time I updated this thing.

Name: Emily. Embers if you're my dad. Everyone else, Emily.

Age: At the moment (April 14, 2009) I'm sixteen. Booh-yah. -_-;;

Family: Mum, Dad, little sister (three years younger and my complete opposite in every way- we get on though, so it's cool) and dog. Big, black and fluffly. She likes to sleep on my bed, especially in summer, and Melbourne summers can get to the high forties. And my parents wonder why I'm always sleeping over at friends' places.

Country of origin: My family comes from all over the place, I'm a bit of a mutt in that regard- but I consider myself Australian, and that's where I'm living right now. I think I'll move when I graduate though- maybe to Japan, coz I can speak the language, and when I went over there on a three week school trip I had a blast. And you can actually take showers there, I hear (I currently stand under the nozzle for a grand total of two minutes, with a bucket at my feet that I throw on the garden when I'm done. Watering from the hose is prohibited. Kill me now).

Aaaaaand a little bit about my life (coz I know you're just dying to know more about me...):

I love to read. Favourite authors include Don Delillo, Jeanette Winterson, Douglas Adams, Bill Bryson, Jostein Gardener, Ammon Shea, and whats-her-face. The one that wrote Poisonwood Bible. Yeah, her. She's good too.

But, one of my greatest passions would have be linguistics. More specifically, etymology, or the ways words change as you trace them backward through history. It can give a lot of insight into the essences of particular words that otherwise perhaps wouldn't occur - one of my favourites is sarcasm. That entered English from Greek with the word 'sarkazein', which means 'to strip off the flesh'. Doesn't that give a whole new dimension to the word? And what about a word as mundane as 'remorse', which came from a Latin word that means literally 'to bite back'? Get it? Remorse, bite back? Isn't it wonderful?!

...ahem.

For anyone else who's interested in that sort of thing, I recommend the site etymonline. It's my favourite resource.

Another of my passions is obscure words. These are largely useless, but immensely entertaining. I never realised that there were so many words out there. As Bill Bryson put it: 'If you have a morbid fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth, there's a word for it: arachibutyrophobia. There's a word to describe the state of being a woman: muliebrity. There is a word to describe a sudden breaking off of thought: aposiopesis. If you harbour an urge to look through the windows of the houses you pass, there's a word for it: cytoscopophilia. When you are dropping off to sleep and experience that sudden sensation of falling, there's a word for it: myoclonic jerk. If you want to say that a word has a circumflex on its penultimate syllable, without saying flat out that it has a circumflex there, there is a word for it: properispomenon. There is even a word for a figure of speech in which two connotative words linked by a conjunction express a complex notion that would normally by conveyed by an adjective and a substantive working together. It is heniadys. (But of course)."

Some personal favourites though are:

paneity: the state of being bread

cimicine: smelling of bugs (because we all go around sniffing cockroaches, don't we?)

acnestis: the point of the back that cannot be reached to be scratched

advesperate: to approach evening. (I've been contemplating writing a book called 'How to be a Wanker.' I reckon one of the first entries would be the requirement that, at every opportunity, you call to your friends, 'We should head home soon! It's advesperating!'

porporate: the state of being dressed in purple (fyi, 'atrate' means one dressed in black; 'coccinated' means one dressed in scarlet)

sesquipedalian: having many syllables (literally in Latin it means 'a foot and a half long')

fleeten: having the colour of skim milk.

I could go on (and on and on and on and on...)

Feel free to contact me if you want more words (God save you if you do, I am merciless), or else I can give you some resources to look them up yourself. I have shelves of books and my favourites tab on my computer is flooded with sites. I'd be more than happy (delighted ecstatic over-the-moon) if anyone contacted me regarding that.

My friends know by now that I have a perhaps borderline unhealthy obsession with words, and have come to accept this proclivity with relative good grace, and I am absolutely in love with each and everyone one of them because they have the grace to pretend to be interested whenever I begin to rant. I have a sneaking suspicion that my best friend Meg, who I rant to the most often, gets a little irritated with me sometimes, despite sharing my enthusiasm for amusing obscure words. She just doesn't apprieciate it so much when I go on for ten minutes about how neat it is that both 'philoprogeneity' and 'philostorgy' refer to a parent's love for his or her child (When I asked her about this recently she said, "The point at which I became bored has long since passed". I've chosen to interpret this as a good thing).

Well, that's me in a nutshell. Now that you've had a bit of a glimpse at my inner workings, enjoy my stories!!