The Salubrious Quip Conundrum
Have you ever quipped? You probably have but you didn’t call it quipping. You’ve heard other people quip too, but you probably didn’t think they were quipping. Quip, as a noun, means a funny remark, or, as a verb, the act of making the remark. That means you can quip a quip.
The funny thing about quip is that people only quip in magazines and newspapers. Quip is not a word we usually use in speech. Even though a lot of quipping goes on out here in the real world, we rarely use that term to describe it. We might say a person made a funny remark or a joke, but we never say they quipped. The word quip usually appears only in print.
The same thing is true of the word conundrum. A conundrum is a particularly difficult problem that must be solved. We all have conundrums from time to time, but we don’t call them conundrums. We might say we have a problem, an illness, or a difficult situation, but I’ve never heard anyone say they are facing a conundrum. Like quip, conundrum is almost always found only in newspaper and magazine articles.
And then there’s the word salubrious. You don’t hear salubrious in conversation very much, and that’s a shame, because it’s a nice word that rolls easily off of the tongue and into the other person’s ear. Salubrious means that something is healthy and appropriate, as in, “The weather tonight is salubrious for…
