A Month of Me: Day 7 - A New Word, Or Two

I learned a new word today.  Well, actually I learned two new words, but I only meant to learn one.  

Mr. Guy and The Lady made me use that big fat book of words called a dictionary to look up what the word texture means.

Texture - the visual and especially tactile quality of a surface

Tactile???  

Sometimes that dictionary book is not very helpful.  It uses more words that I don't know to try to explain to me what the word that I didn't know the meaning of in the first place means.

Tactile sounds like what you walk on when you spill the thumbtacks from The Lady and Mr. Guy's bulletin board all over the floor.  So, Texture - the visual and especially painful feeling of a walking on a surface covered in thumbtacks.  Hmm...I don't think that is right.  At least texture and  tactile both start with "t" so I only have to go back a few pages in this dictionary book to find out what tactile really means.

Tactile - pertaining to or affecting the sense of touch

Let me see if I understand this...Texture - the visual and especially the quality affecting the sense of touch of a surface.   Maybe I get it.  Walking on thumbtacks on the floor would definitely have a texture that affects my sense of the quality of touch on my monster feet.  I wonder if all texture is painful.  I had to ask The Lady about that.

The Lady told me that not all textures are painful.  She said that texture is just a general word used to group all the different words used to describe the way things feel.  Smooth, rough, prickly, scratchy, are all words that can be used to describe texture.  I asked her if thumbtacky was a texture word.  She and Mr. Guy said that maybe it could be if that was the best way to describe how something felt to me.

We went on a scavenger hunt for different kinds of textures.

My fur is soft.  My claws and my horns are hard.  Mr. Guy's bald head is smooth but his face fur is prickly.  The sidewalk is rough.  The floor where I was playing is lego-y.

We went outside and looked at the bark on the trees in our yard.  My favorite one is the river birch tree.  It's bark is shaggy.  In case you don't know what shaggy means,  it means having long, thick, unkempt hair or fur.  Sometimes The Lady tells Mr. Guy and me that our fur looks shaggy.  When that happens, Mr. Guy gets his trimmed.  I tell The Lady that my shaggy fur is part of my character and I don't want it to get trimmed.  I don't even really want it to get brushed!   So far, that has worked!  I think that now I understand this whole idea of texture a little better.

I do have one more question, though.  How can we have a river birch tree in our front yard when we don't have a river?  I want to know the answer to this question, but I'm afraid that if I ask, Mr. Guy will make me go get another big book with lots of words that I don't know.  The brain of this little blue and orange furry monster is too full to hold anything else new today.  The answer to this question will have to wait until another day.