Fancy words & fanciful words

I came across something today that might develop into a real writing tool for me.

I was posting a comment to a friend's blog today and it was one of those that requires you to enter a password before posting. The "word" that came up was REMIDDLE.

I like that non-word. It seems delightfully familiar but of course I don't have a clue what it means. And as I let my mind wander to try to find a meaning, I found a sentence, then a paragraph forming about the process of "remiddling." It had a fantasy flavor to it and I may take time to play with it some more.

Yesterday, it was VADAL. Sounds adjectival, don't you think? Now it turns out that Vadal is actually the name of a community in India. I hadn't know that. So I could do some research and choose to write a short story set in Vadal, or I could work on a setting where the appropriate - the only - descriptive word for some noun would be that it was "vadal."

Keep your eyes open. Those passwords might just open the door to some truly vadal writing.

Training to amble

I ran across an interesting word the other day:

trammel

(TRAM-uhl)

MEANING:

noun:
1. Something that limits or hinders.
2. A fishing net having three layers.
3. An instrument for drawing ellipses.
4. A shackle used in training a horse to amble.
5. An instrument for gauging and aligning parts of a machine.
6. A hook for hanging a pot or a kettle over a fire.

verb tr.: To restrain; to hinder.

Now apart from being a very versatile word with a variety of divergent meanings, the fourth definition caught my eye.

I had no idea horses had to be trained to amble. I thought ambling was one of those things that went automatically with unbroken stretches of desert, western sunsets, dusty trails and worn leather saddles. Maybe I've been confusing the cowboy with the horse.

Which poses a problem. As the pace of summer slows things down just a little, I've been okay with ambling through the weeks until school begins again and my daily writing and art routine has better defined hours. I'm still writing, still drawing and painting, but perhaps not at the same speed.

Does this mean I've been trammeled?