My daughter has always been a gentle soul who feels every big emotion with her entire being. Oftentimes, these emotions inundate her, which leads to a meltdown and plenty of tears and inconsolable crying. As her mother, I do my very best to help her work through them, and sometimes, I achieve the goal of calm. Other times, I find myself just as overwhelmed as her, and it's just best to take a break.
We all experience those big feelings, best described as overwhelming or - in today's case - inundating. As adults, we have a better idea of how to handle these emotions. For a preschooler, that moment feels absolutely impossible. Honestly, though, I get it. Inundate is a perfect word to describe that moment where you feel like everything is impossible.
Inundate | i-(ˌ)nən-ˌdāt: verb: overwhelm; to cover with a flood, overflow
Cool fact about inundate that led me to learn about the word in the first place: it and undulate have the same root word, unda, which is the Latin word for wave. What's even cooler is that there are other words with unda at their roots: abound, surround, and redound, which all meant - at some point - some derivative of to overflow. Of course, only inundate still carries that as one of its current meanings.
Finding this word while researching undulate yesterday made me so fantastically excited about what other new words are out there for me to find. I'm always working hard to find new things while reading, but sometimes I have those books that just don't add a new word to my vocabulary, whether it's because I just haven't been reading as much due to time constraints or because I've gone back to a favorite of mine. It's nice to see that I can certainly find new ways to discover words!
Inundate | ɪn.ʌn.deɪt: verb: to give someone so much work or so many things that they cannot deal with it all
Luckily for me, this word was in one of my current reads; I just hadn't gotten to the chapter yet! Oh, how I do so love my kindle app and its ability to look up a word and show me where it is in the book. It makes my life as a writer so much easier! Researching a word in a book is such an inundating experience.
The particular use of inundate in this setting is actually the same way I used it in reference to my daughter. Emotion. Like waves on the ocean, our emotions ebb and flow, and sometimes that flow becomes a tidal wave we just aren't prepared for.
More emotions inundated her - predominate among them FEAR.
Though I'm not that far in the book, this one sentence drew me in enough that I found myself reading the entire scene and spoiling that part for myself. This is the danger of reading ahead. Still, I am excited to see how things unfold!
How did you feel about inundate? How will you use it, or do you prefer the simplicity of overwhelm? Do you have any other fun words to use? Let me know all about it! And until tomorrow, happy reading!
Comments