con = together

(image Meredith Dittmar, Portland, OR. The best use of bake-able clay I've seen in my life!)

This one goes out to all the word nerds. Ever since an English class in high school that used Latin roots as a way to increase students' vocabulary, I've had a fascination with the way that language morphs over time, and how you can often track it by tracking these prefixes, suffixes and words of origin. Some of my favorite words are "con" and "com" words-- prefixes that generally mean "together." Here are some "cons" that I think have an almost tactile-visual-physical effect (with links to actual definitions).

conflate: Relate this to inflate, and you get two or more growing orbs, spreading into each other until they engulf one another and become one thing with several layers of skin. Balloons within balloons.

confluence: Cousin to the word fluent, which is about flowing (fun to think of language as something that flooows if you know it well), this word literally means "flowing together," so it makes an image of a braided river in my mind.

continuum: This is more intuitive, but there's something about that double U that makes this word itself feel like a particle humming along a time-line. Both humming and continuum even have an up-and-down typographic pattern... hmmmm....

conflagrant: Flagrant is burning hot obvious, because it has the root of fire, and conflagration is even hotter. We all burn together. This word throws tongues of fire.

constituent: Because this word accidentally sounds like the unrelated word stitch, it makes it have a very active role... one thread that stitches together a patchwork of cloth. Unifies and simplifies, and thus, represents the whole. The sound of the word is also very buttoned-down and formal.

convivial: Love this one. It throws a little party in just nine letters. Its roots literally spell out living together (think vivacious), but in usage it's about LIVING together, and usually involves food and wine and probably dancing.