I found a new word. I have been looking for this one all my life…and now that I have found it I love it. I want to use it.

Horripilation. It rolls off the tongue. It sends shivers up my spine. It suggest exactly what it means. It sounds right. What a glorious, delicious, chocolate-rich meaningful word is horripilation!

Back where I come from in Australia, we used the ghastly expression “goose pimples.” Now that sounds like a bad case of avian acne, when it actually means that frisson of hair-raised skin-roughening that comes with fear. Write “goose pimples” in the middle of your scary scene and your reader has visions of complexion-challenged teenaged waterfowl.

The rest of the world uses “goose bumps” which still has barnyard overtones, and still doesn’t produce the feeling of delicious spine-tingling fear.

But oh, horripilation. That does it.
Why, oh, why have writers been settling for goose-bumps??? Why have I lived so long without ever coming across this perfect expression, when I have been looking for it for decades?

First person who reads a book of mine containing this word and tells me, gets a free copy of the next book thereafter…

P.S. I haven’t forgotten about the bad-news on yoga. Really. It will have its blog soon.