Thing To Do Today: cavort.

 How do people know what a word means?

Yes, I know they sometimes look up words in dictionaries. In this case the answer will be authoritative, if probably incomplete and quite possibly a hundred years or so out of date; but most words we use we've never looked up in a dictionary.

We understand these (or we think we do) through a mixture of context and guessing.

(Let's stop here for a moment to admire the genius of the human infant...)

So, cavort. I've always thought this means to throw oneself into attitudes of careless joy (and basically that's right, because the dictionary says it means to prance or caper) but I've only just realised that I've always associated cavort with the word contort just because it sounds similar. So the prancing about of someone cavorting, for me, has always involved extravagant gestures.

My understanding of the joyful part of the word must have come from the context. People nearly always cavort with joy, don't they? (Well, that's human nature: we don't prance about when we're feeling sad: we trudge, instead.)

Anyway, many people tell us that exercise is cheering, so perhaps a little cavorting might make us happy even if we're glum. 

It must be worth a try.

Mustn't it?

Thing To Do Today: cavort. This word sounds old, but it isn't. It appeared in the 1800s, perhaps from curvet, which is an all-feet-off-the-ground jump made by a horse.