It’s just past 10pm on a Sunday evening and I’m typing away. This week’s post (about hashtag MarkHWords) must go out on time!

Unlike what had happened the past 2 weeks… I was late on both counts 🙁

Last week, I did a sort-of live blog on the WPCF Community Walk 2017 held at Punggol Park, an event which I had attended on a cool Sunday morning. The post should have been up that afternoon, since I had the text already recorded on my mobile.

As it was, another DIY project kept me interested and busy, such that I postponed posting till Monday. And with so many photos to share, I exceeded the 3-hour time limit that I wanted to stay within! Lesson learned: go easy on those pics.

The week before that, I was to write about how and why I restarted my exercise routine. Now, I can’t recall why I had delayed writing that article by a day — yes, the post went out on a Monday too!

With 2 late posts in a row, I don’t want this week’s to be off-target. Gotta break this chain of procrastination before it becomes the norm. No way I’m going to let that happen 🙂

So here I am at the keyboard, sacrificing some sleep time. This week, I will talk about some of my wise cracks, posted mainly on Facebook.

What’s My Big Idea This Time with #MarkHWords?

As I see it, gurus from the motivational/inspirational sphere — self-development, also — are fond of dishing out advice.

Many times, their words of wisdom or reckoning are nothing short of commonsense. Yet, because these came from well-regarded people in their fields, the messages carry much weight.

Of course, there are times when what the gurus say are profound and worth thinking about. Or witty; or humorous. Such tend to be fewer in occurrence though.

With many people fond of name-dropping, quoting wise words from these masters is deemed cool, I think. At least, it can make one appear well-read. As such, there is no shortage of quotations floating around in cyberspace.

So I thought, why not write something that’s funny, witty or informational? Perhaps, even inspirational. After all, my mind does go into wise-cracking mode once in a while 🙂

You’ll Never Know When You’d Be Quoted

The next thought made it seem worthwhile: if I produced enough of such messages and people have seen them, there may come a day when someone decides to quote my writing. That would be nice, for sure.

And so, some time back in the first half of 2016 — it could have been earlier, I’m not too certain; I’d need to dig into my records — I started to post on Facebook selectively with the hashtag #MarkHWords. If you do an FB search now, you’d come across some of my past messages.

Under that hashtag, I’d posted “word acronyms”, quips, thoughts inspired by books, Chinese poems, stuff about language play, etc. At times, these messages appeared first on my WittyCulus FB page and got shared on my personal timeline.

Just how do #MarkHWords posts look like? Let’s get into a couple of examples…

Marriage — Most Times, This Happens After Getting Engaged, Doesn’t It?

Here’s a recent #MarkHWords post about marriage. This idea came to me on April 28th this year.

What had struck me immediately about the word were the last 3 letters: AGE. It was obvious to me those were screaming out “After Getting Engaged!”

That’s how my grey matter factory up there works, by the way — I’d see such “hidden” messages when I’m in the zone 🙂

With such a highly relevant tail-end for (what I call) a word acronym, I pondered the possibilities and came up with this tongue-in-cheek one about not rushing into marriage.

#MarkHWords - Marriage Acronym funny version

(In case you don’t quite know Singlish, which is Singapore-style English, “anyhowly” is like an adverb which means “without due consideration” roughly.)

A couple of months later, on June 7th, I found an answer to a serious version of marriage. Yeah!

I was able to include key ingredients of a successful marriage into my acrostic message of matrimonial alliance.

But both takes on marriage only appeared a day later on the fan page of WittyCulus.com. Haiz, sometimes I do get lazy…

#MarkHWords - Marriage Acronym serious version

Live Life — What a Nice Interplay of Word Acronyms!

Of late, I had been reading about being in the Now and experiencing life for what it really is. A certain book may have been the trigger for this next #MarkHWords example.

I was intrigued about fitting a real inspirational message into those 2 words: Live Life. What turned out surprised and satisfied me at the same time 🙂

My take on word acronyms is making up acrostics which help explain the words involved. For example, the acronym for “Live” should give some insight into what living is about. On that same note, “Life” should describe our existence.

However, I saw the opportunity to play with these 2 closely related words. And it turned out my interplay of acronyms made a message which integrated both words tightly in a meaningful and coherent way.

#MarkHWords - Live Life, interplay of word acronyms

I really love this neat #MarkHWords creation, to be honest. Let me know what you think with your comments, please.

An Excellent Outlet for Creative Juices

In my opinion, creating #MarkHWords posts has provided an avenue for my creative juices. It’s another form of expression for me, not unlike my song parodies on WittyCulus.com.

When inspiration comes knocking, I now have one more outlet to channel my thoughts. Who knows, maybe one day I would figure out an acrostic for this very word which fuels excitement in my writing.

By the way, WittyCulus is already an acronym for something wacky. See if you can figure it out before checking its About page 🙂

I’ll be back with more works with hashtag MarkHWords. Most definitely!