What feelings does this word evoke? What sorts of memories does it recall? Which of your senses start to tingle? How would you represent what this word means to you?
This word forks, and at first I am more drawn to the more active sense. One can be curious about a thing that is curious. I am immediately reminded of Alex in Leeds, who has a tattoo that reads Curiosity > Enthusiasm > Action – a fantastic motto. Curiosity gets a bad press – it famously killed the cat, and ‘satiable curtiosity is the reason for the trunk on the Elephant’s Child. This seems unfair. To know things for the sheer pleasure of knowing, not out of malice, but because there is a space in one’s mind where a fact ought to go, that seems very wholesome to me.
In fact, this seems to be a very literary word. Down the other fork, where it is things that are curious, there is the Old Curiosity Shop (I have never read it) and Alice again. Curiouser and curiouser. Oddness, interestingness, something-not-quite-right-about-thisness. Something that is curious makes one curious even if one isn’t naturally curious.
Are curious people curious? They are usually good fun to talk to; they don’t mind admitting what they don’t know, and they share what they do.
Curious.
Kathleen Jowitt 