If you want to learn about all of them, you’ll need to go to the Merriam-Webster website and click here.

I selected a few, mostly to be able to show some photographs from a regular walk that cheers me up should I be cantankerous (difficult or irritating to deal with.) As you might suspect I walk that walk often.

It is a promenade that starts off Macadam Av, at Willamette park. It winds its way along the river, with views over small sailboat harbors, sandbars, center islands where herons and bald eagles nest. You get to see some bridges, and the skyline of downtown, if you go far enough North instead of turning around because you are hangry (irritable or angry because of hunger.)

I walked here for 30 plus years, in the beginning with the baby stroller, since it was easy to navigate on the asphalt and the boys would get a kick out of seeing all the birds. That is before they started to walk, talk and become eristic (characterized by disputatious and often subtle and specious reasoning) in their desire to minimize physical exercise.

A defining feature is a small sculpture of a beaver. For the life of me I can’t remember if it was already there when the kids were little. My own inner child’s soul starts to radiate, whenever I pass by, because someone with a sense of delight puts it into seasonally appropriate costumes. Captious (marked by an often ill-natured inclination to stress faults and raise objections) people might object to disgracing art – I thrive on the fact that it makes me laugh.

The walk is not for the faint of heart, though. Even the most stoic among us can become choleric (easily moved to often unreasonable or excessive anger : hot-tempered) when almost hit by a speeding biker for the umpteenth time.

It is also not for lovers of expensive footwear, who are guaranteed to be fumish (tending to fume, choleric) when they step into the geese droppings that cover the path. And speaking of the all-perversive geese: walking there with your dog on leash will make you splenetic (marked by bad temper, malevolence, or spite) because your arm is dangling by a thread from your shoulder socket after being tugged once too often towards the gaggle of Canadians.

Yet on a day like this, where I am surly (irritably sullen and churlish in mood or manner) because my external hard drive crashed and I have no access to my iphoto library until it is repaired, the walk is just the ticket. All photos posted today were taken by an iPhone across the last years (thank you, iCloud), and so will be the one this afternoon.

Let’s hear it for irascible geese:

And here is something about parachuting beavers:

Tell me this didn’t cheer you up…..