1237 Refulgent

Sometimes words sound exactly like what you’d expect—“snake,” for instance, or “yogurt.” Other times they don’t sound right at all.
Like this other name for a place that refines stuff. Refine sounds so elegant, eliminating all the ugly stuff and keeping the best. A place that refines stuff is perfectly named when you call it a refinery. Like there’s finery involved.
And tea and crumpets perhaps.
Then there’s the other name: Smelter. Smelter sounds like an icky place. Smelly, putrid, how would anything good come from a place called a smelter? Reminds me of my farm days when I asked the vet if the odor coming from our old cow Flossy meant she was sick.
“Sick?” he says, “Have you smelter?”
Then there’s the weird word that means physical beauty. It’s pulchritude. Spelled p-u-l-c-h- like mulch, so it looks like it means something mashed up, and full of gooeyness.
But it’s actually pronounced pulk-rih-tude. So it sounds like it has something to do with bulk, folk, or President James K. Polk.
You know, the president who promoted Manifest Destiny and brought Texas in, waged a war with Mexico for California, Arizona and New Mexico, and bluffed the British into giving us Oregon and Washington.
Polk did it all with his quiet, firm, and poker-bluffing attitude.
Now that would be a good way to use Polk-ri-tude.
Lastly, there’s the word refulgent. It means radiant or glowing. But it doesn’t sound like it means glowing. It sounds like it means stuffed full of something.
He pushed back from the table as is gut was refulgent with his overindulgence.
Bad move getting in the car with him. He was refulgent from all that chili.
I thought we were driving by the smelter...
America, ya gotta love it.