Smitten was an odd word. The Doctor didn't particularly have a liking to the word, right next to sofa or floccinaucinihilipilification. He couldn't understand for the lives of him why any language would possess such a long word for something that meant "making something to be worthless by deprecation." Any sensible person would use the word "insult" or something close to it. But that was the human race he supposed. Making long complicated things without ever having a reason to. Perhaps they did it to make their language fancier. Either way, it was stupid.
So the point stood. Smitten was an odd word. It felt like it had something to do with the word mitten, a word the Doctor had no trouble at all with, but wasn't. No definitions of smitten had anything close to "an item of clothing that keeps your hands warm".
When you heard the word smitten, you thoughts would immediately go to stories of Cupid, when of course, it had absolutely nothing to do with that at all. (Well, except for the fact that Cupid was the god of love. The Doctor coughed uncomfortably at the empty room.)
Smitten came from the word smite, which would be quite surprising to the casual reader. The definitions are so different you wonder how in blue blazes "smitten" originated from the word "smite".
Furthermore, it simply sounded odd when coming out of an adult's mouth, as if the word was created to define a fun and cutesy way of saying "infatuated" or "taken with". The kind of word a 5 year old would have created while learning how to read. A word a grown human shouldn't be using and yet did, as if using the word would make them younger. Which was not the case. Smitten is not a magical word either.
He also hated it when someone used it to describe how they felt about a dashing young girl they had met in a coffee shop one day. He couldn't fathom why that word would be used in such a sentence. Didn't that label you as some person completely obsessed with the girl you spoke of? To anyone listening, a sentence like that would make them uncomfortable and worry about that person's state of mental health. If he was a friend of the man who had made to such a declaration, he'd walk out of the room right then and there and advise the girl in question to run away from the man in her living room, change her name, get a different address, phone number and buy several oddly colored wigs while burning all objects the man had touched in a 500 year ritual with her closest friends.
Thankfully, such an occasion never crossed his path and if his luck held out, it never would.
It just agitated him, that word. It was so simple and yet obviously irritating enough to wander into his thinking time. That alone made it more annoying. Such a useless, annoying word should not be disturbing his thinking time! He rather liked his thinking time! Especially when it wasn't occupied with how much he despised a word in the English language.
Sighing, he put his face down on the table and covered his head with his arms.
Smitten was a useless word… (The Doctor felt the urge to ram his face into the table repeatedly). When there are several other words meaning the same thing, why did humans make another one? Was it to make themselves feel smarter when they used a more complicated, uncommon word to say an everyday thing? If that was the case, then it was plain rubbish. When you want someone to come in and sit down, you tell them to come in and sit down. If he said "Enter and rest your posterior on the sitting device", he would be considered utterly mad.
The tipping of bare footsteps echoed through the room alerted him to a new presence and he immediately sat up and turned around at the noise. It was Rose standing at the kitchen door in her pajamas with an apologetic look on her face. Whether to be annoyed or relieved at the interruption was up for grabs, but he was fairly certain he was relieved.
"Sorry, did I wake you?" Her voice was low in a hushed whisper, as if unsure if he was still thinking.
He stiffened and shook his head. "Nah. Just thinking."
"About what?"
The Doctor shrugged and attempted a nonchalant look. "Nothing much. Just… TARDIS stuff."
Rose looked at him skeptically. "TARDIS stuff." She stuck her tongue between her teeth and mused it over. "Well, I don't know how you can be more specific than that." Opening the fridge, she got a carton of milk.
He didn't exactly know why, but his tongue suddenly felt very heavy all of a sudden, disabling his fine tuned ability to talk. Especially when Rose looked at him with her specialized glare that said "I know you're lying, so spill".
He didn't know why he didn't feel like telling her, just like he didn't know why his heartbeat had just doubled. Agonizing over a simple word was something he could tell her. She'd probably just roll her eyes at him anyway. Really. Telling her wasn't so hard.
Several seconds passed.
Okay, so maybe it was pretty hard. Thankfully, Rose claimed herself too tired and left the room in a sleepy walk, but not before running her hands through his hair and murmuring something about him needing sleep too.
The inability to use his limbs or his mouth around Rose had become more frequent these days and when you're a person who likes to talk a lot, not being able to talk is fairly close to a version of hell. If there is one.
But even more annoying was the sudden realization of a pure and simple fact that he had been avoiding for a while.
He had completely fallen for her. Which, ironically had been the exact thing he had been trying not to do, but then… the universe is a crappy crappy place where nothing goes your way, unless you're very lucky.
And apparently his luck had run out because… He supposed… if he wanted to put it in simpler words…
He was smitten.