What’s your favorite word?

I have so many favourite words that it would be too hard to choose one, but I do have a word that my mum loved to use in her frequent work rants.

Audacity.

I love that in my mind it can be both positive and negative.

Willingness to take bold risks is a fabulously empowering thing. Bold is not stupid or dangerous.

In my mums work world women took bold, audacious risks, always for the benefit of other women. Bold risks because they ignored rules and regulations to better improve the services and experience of their exclusively female patients.

Men in senior positions often had the audacity to question and try to control the decisions made by these women for women. This was always the subject of her regular work based rants, always down the phone to people hidden and anonymous to me.

Somehow Audacity is a really precious word, one that I never feel quite able to use in its negative tense with anything like the accuracy of my highly indignant mother. Could I ever be cross, at her near-nuclear levels?

On the positive,though, I love it. Audaciousness is very much something I respect in almost every aspect of my life.

Audaciously I am using a completely unrelated image for this blog. The audacity of it!