PERFUNCTORY

Every now and then I get words or phrases popping into my head. These are obviously things I've heard and subconsciously registered. I've not always known what they are - mostly because I didn't pay attention to the News bulletins that my Dad was glued to.

Keir Starmer, Director of Public Prosecutions

The conciliation service ACAS

Boutros Boutros Ghali

It's not always names and phrases though. Sometimes it's just single words that my subconscious mind likes the sound of. It must yoink them out of the ether and file them away somewhere in my dusty old brain.

It's always words like eponymous or ineluctable - things I sort of know, I've sort of heard but I've not fully processed. My brain often stores them with an imprint of their context too, which is handy, because for reasons I can't explain I seem to learn how to use a particular word long before I've worked out its real definition.

But this is how vocabulary works isn't it? Words spread through the atmosphere, being stored by people who are hearing them for the first time, ready for use in their overlapping circles. Our vocabulary grows with the hearing and grows with the reading - but we don't always know it.

So today's word, shimmying its way out of the dusty brain cabinet, is the word perfunctory.

Perfunctory.

I think it's beautiful - look at the almost symmetrical way its middle consonants are stuck together - of the eleven letters, only three of them are vowels. Also the sound of those consonants skips along, emphasising that middle stress on 'func' and then leaping happily and neatly away to the clipped y sound. It's a very rhythmic sort of word. And no, not the kind of word that reminds you of caribou nibbling at the croquet hoops.

The trouble is, it means something rather disappointing. It means simply doing the minimum amount of work. I looked it up. Per- means according to and -func comes from the latin word for work or perform. So it's doing only what's expected and no more.

I don't want to live like that, as appealing as the word might sound. It's the opposite of excellent or diligent - a sort of careless that'll-do attitude to life. It's not for me, perfunctory, even though it's quite easy to spot and even though I do slip into perfunction quite often. It happens especially when I'm tired, juggling big stuff in my brain,or even just sitting at my desk on a Thursday morning, thinking about words that my brain has collected over the years in its own... ineluctable... way.