The Meaning Behind the Words
At precisely 8:00 a.m. each morning, a new vocabulary word from Dictionary.com is delivered to my phone. This is a gleeful time for me. From 7:45 a.m. until the university chapel bell clapper strikes the soundbow eight times, I become a child awaiting Christmas morning. The rapture! My heart beats in rhythmic octameter in anticipation.
This past Sunday morning, twenty-three seconds past the hour, as I sipped my golden turmeric coffee, I noticed the word of the day (Perspicacious) had a phonetical error. The horror! I clutched my chest. The room became hazy, warping and waving, blurring at the edges1.
It was as if the living room had employed one of those cinematic techniques symbolizing a character was having a flashback.
Reader, I am that character. I was in the throes of a flashback.
A bit of backstory…
The flashback:
It was four years, three months, and a couple days ago. Ron and I had had a minor disagreement over word choices and pronunciation. There was something about the way he corrected me when I mispronounced a word during my lengthy debate-tirade that really sent me ‘there’.
I was taking a deep breath before continuing my heated denunciation of whatever infraction we were discoursing when he uttered the single word, carefully enunciating it, syllable by syllable–a bit too dramatically, I might add.
This quite vexed me. I do not recall the offending word, only that it was a transparent attempt to one-up me in our ongoing duel of vocabulary. I surmised his intent was to wound me reprehensibly with his latest verbal joust2.
I became quite cross. I went silent. During this solemn period of inertia, he seemed quite jovial. This irked me further. I discreetly left the room and retreated to solitude to share the truth and emotional depth of the scenario with my intimate spiral-bound companion.
Back to the here and now:
Alas, I am a bit distracted, perhaps I have a touch of the vapors after mentally exerting myself, my nerves, my nerves…and, hmmm, where was I going with this…?
I’m not sure.
Perhaps I felt it was my good citizenry duty to ensure that perspicacious is pronounced pur-spuh-kay-shus rather than pur-spi-key-shus.
Or perhaps it was because 51.73 months ago I was reading a novel and I came across the delightful word perspicacious.
Yes! Sunday’s word du jour.
On that fateful day, I excitedly interrupted Ron and read the passage to him whilst he was in the middle of concentrating on who-knows-what. I also made a pun. A very humorous pun. I was quite underwhelmed that he didn’t match my enthusiasm in his response.
Today’s word of the day was a delightful reminder that when Ron grows particularly intent upon precision and responds in a clipped, disciplined manner, I call him Percy Perspicacious—or simply Percy—and indulge his pretense of being a character straight out of a Victorian novel by Charles Dickens.
***
1.No! I certainly was NOT having a fainting spell or launching into an alcohol-induced stupor. My-my-my, how quickly you jump to conclusions! Fiddle de-dee I whisper to myself, scornfully.
2.Ron, being a cavalryman, possesses a decidedly gentlemanly, hussar-esque air when brandishing a sword, and would doubtlessly have preferred the word thrust to joust. But:
- A. This is my blog post; and
- B. Thrust carries rather too scandalous a connotation. I blushed merely typing it.
Note to the Reader:
Dear Reader, I find myself presently in the grip of a Charlotte Brontë phase. I have been imagining what life must have felt like for our dear heroine in mid-19th-century England—the shifting social order, the narrow corridors allotted to women, the solemn moral codes that governed polite society.
It seems fitting, then, that I too have undertaken a small moral reform of my own. During this season of Lent, I am attempting to curb my reliance upon profanity as a form of emotional punctuation. The effort, I assure you, requires fortitude.
All this unfolds while I reside in the United Kingdom, where—if one allows the imagination its liberties—even an ordinary walk from Waitrose to my flat may feel faintly Brontëan. The air is damp, the sky brooding, and I picture moors and mist where there are in fact only tidy pavements and the modest groceries I can manage to carry.
