Verbicide : noun

1) the destruction of the sense or value of a word

2) one who willfully commits verbicide

In need of a doorstop, he bought a heavy dictionary at the flea market. Waiting to check out, he spied a dusty entomologist kit, complete with several glass display cases. He purchased this as well.

At home, dictionary against the door’s draft, he examined the kit. It contained: tweezers, an exacto knife, a field guide to insects, a box of needles, a few empty jars, and a bottle of chloroform. He unscrewed the bottle and breathed deeply.

Eventually, he focused on the field guide. The illustrations were crude. And, as it was winter, it would be several months before he could catch, kill, or dissect anything. He passed the time by carving words from the guide with the exacto knife.

The first word he mounted was Lepidoptera. The corners curled a bit around the impaling needle, but, within the glass case it held a certain artistic intent. Inspired, he added Mantis religiosa, just for an element of suspense.

Within a week, the guide was shredded beyond use. Several cases were displayed on the wall. The chloroform was down half an inch. Examining his work, his eyes fell upon the discarded dictionary. With a huff… the hunt was on…

He sought the large quarry first. Onomatopoeia had a nice sound to it. Quixotic fit very nicely. The Literati almost escaped in a draft, but he tracked it down and found it hiding behind the desk. Yet as his skills increased, the challenge dwindled.

Feeling the larger words offered too easy a target, he began focusing on the small and slippery. Love and Hate kept jumping off the point; pronouns like I or we were almost impossible to pin down.

As the months passed, he purchased more and more pins. The words overflowed the frames; the montage cocooned him from the cold with a layer of paper. Words leapt out, dancing on the heads of pins. The chloroform was running low.

He became obsessed with the placement of punctuation. He could easily play connect the dot with periods, but where should the question marks go? The semi-colons constantly winked at him. Perhaps an ellipses here…

When spring arrived, the dictionary had lost weight. As a doorstop, it couldn’t restrain the March lion. A gust tore his door open. Glass shattered; the words jumped out of the framework. They circled him en masse and, like chloroform, went straight to his head.