Don't cry on my shoulder

When the holidays are coming up and you start to think about what you're going to do with your two weeks off, you make plans. Big plans. Epic plans. Plans that you have every intention of following through with. Plans you will eventually abandon.

LAUREN'S SEPTEMBER HOLIDAY GOAL: go back to writing that abandoned novel. The shell is there. Most of it is already written. It just needs some tweaking, right?

The original plan was to edit a chapter a day. But thanks to Facebook, Youtube, and convincing myself that I was working by planning out what songs will be in the soundtrack when my novel gets adapted into a film, I was finding it hard to focus. Then, in a brief moment when I was actually managing to get some work done, I was distracted again.

I like to have dictionary.com and thesaurus.com open in another window when I write because I’m prepared to admit that I don't know that many words. And the ones I do know, don't always turn out to mean what I think they do (eg. 'circumvent,' 'masticate' and 'cockchafer.' Next time you’re on dictionary.com, search that last one and click on the little speaker thingy next to it. It never stops being funny. I promise).

thesaurus.com made itself a not-so-powerful enemy when it decided that in its list of alternatives to the word 'cry,' it was going to offer up this little gem: 'ejaculate.'

I'm sorry, but that substitution is going to change the tone of my story. A lot. 'As he watched his daughter leave, he could feel himself start to ejaculate.' No thank you, sir. I won't be buying any incest today.

'Ejaculate' (for most people) is not the same thing as 'cry.' Is thesaurus.com run under the same principals as Wikipedia? And if so, why hasn't anyone told me? How many words have I been misusing?

I'm not the only person who would lose the tone of their work if this were the case. Elvis once sang about Crying in the Chapel. Then think about the impact it would have on the likes of Boys Don't Cry, No Woman, No Cry, Don't Cry For Me, Argentina and most worrying of all, Cry Me a River.

It puts a new slant on the saying 'no use crying over spilt milk.'