Word nerd

My mother was anti-swearing. The strongest language I ever heard her use was "Jesus, Mary, Joseph," which she only deployed on the occasion of one of her children showed up on the doorstep with blood gushing from their head or a limb dangling. She always claimed that resorting to language she considered vulgar or coarse was the hallmark of someone with a limited vocabulary.

Well, au-fucking-contraire to that. Thanks to all my reading, and a long-standing interest in words, I have a fairly extensive vocabulary. Which I use in collaboration with words that would have made my mother's eyeballs bulge and head explode.

Growing up, I was always trying to expand my vocabulary. I avidly read through the "It Pays to Increase Your Word Power" feature in the monthly Reader's Digest and was always on the lookout for ways to insert new words into my conversation. (Which I'm sure my 10 year old friends really appreciated.)

Every once in a while, I'd curl up in an armchair and read through my mother's battered, blue-covered 1940's era Webster's Dictionary looking for new words. I pretty much stopped that practice once I came upon the word "prepuce," which 12 year old me didn't understand particularly well and which, for the life of me, I couldn't come up with any way to introduce it into conversation. ("Hey, was your baby brother circumcised? That means his prepuce was clipped." Not that I would have known what circumcision was - other than observing the holy day that was the Feast of the Circumsion, about which the nuns didn't get into the details - let alone that prepuce was another word for foreskin, which I wouldn't have known either.)

As a word lover, I was probably one of the only students in my freshman high school class who was delighted that one of the required texts was a book called Word Wealth.

Yes, I was definitely a word nerd. I still am.  While I no longer curl up with dictionary hoping to find me another "prepuce," I love acquiring new words, even if I seldom end up using them.

Still, there are some words that I have a complete and utter problem with.

Although I finally know what it means - rudimentary, not fully formed - I can't tell you how many times I've looked up the word inchoate over the years. My inability to understand this word's meaning may stem from the trauma of having pronounced it in-CHOAT the first time I attempted to use it. Even though I was likely using the word correctly with respect to its meaning, stumbling only over the pronunciation, my mistake may have triggered some type of verbal PTSD that I only recently recovered from.

Although perhaps not as extensive or varied as mine - he read science, not literature - my husband had a decent vocabulary, and one of his frequently used words was labile. Whether Jim meant it in the scientific sense - unstable, continually undergoing breakdown - or in the everyday sense - open to change - it's a word that I get when I hear it in context. But presented with the word labile? Get me to a dictionary! I never remember what it means.

Opaque tights were popular when I was in high school. And here I am, 60 years on, having to stop and think for a moment whether it means clear and see-through or obscure and hard to understand.

I so want to be able to use the word jejune - not in conversation, but in the written word - but for the life of me, its meaning eludes me.

Sigh...

And not that there'll be any pay off, I must away to a book that may increase my word power, my word wealth.

Any takers for antidisestablishmentarianism?