Ah, to wake as a cat might: purr, pandiculate, approach the perpendicular, expand, open the Pandora’s box of the day.
Is there one word in there that’s a bit of a stretch? If so, it would be pandiculate. I don’t mean to say that it’s beyond your reach lexically; it’s just that pandiculation is literally a bit of a stretch. It’s the fancy word for that yawning stretch you do first thing in the morning (or, depending, at various other times, I suppose). You do not need to gesticulate when you pandiculate, but I won’t tell you not to.
There is a connection between pandiculation and gesticulation; it’s the same piece as you see in vermiculation and articulation and a few others; it’s also related to the -cule in molecule and minuscule and ridicule, among others. It just means, more or less, ‘little’; that is, it’s a diminutive.
So pandiculation is a little something. A little what? Let me expand a little on this: pandiculate (and pandiculation) comes from Latin pandiculor, which means ‘stretch oneself’; you can still see the diminutive in there, which, when removed, takes us back to pando, which means ‘I spread, I stretch, I extend’ – or, yes, ‘I expand’, and yes, that’s the same pand. So pandiculor is ‘I expand a little’.
But just a little. We don’t want to pass out. Which, oh, yeah: pass, the verb, comes from Latin passus, ‘(a) step’, which is the past participle of – yes – pando. Meanwhile, Pandora is unrelated (the name comes from Greek for ‘all gifts’), and so is panda (which probably comes from Nepali or Tibetan).
But waking up lazily, like a panda or a cat, is a gift. Might as well stretch it out while you can. And then, if it’s a weekend day off, you can later on have a glass of wine. I’ve found just the bottle for you, from South Africa:
Sesquiotica 