WORDY

by Melodie Johnson Howe

Derivations aside, there are certain words that I find, odd, irritating, or just plain ugly sounding. I know this stems from my childhood when I was learning to read and pronounce words. Vocabulary was not easy for me and I remember having to be tutored. Looking back I think I may have been dyslexic. Whatever the reason, it was not an easy task. I was intrigued by words and their meanings but sometimes they would appear to me as a jumble. So as a person with a speech impediment becomes a newscaster or an actor, I became a woman of words, a writer.

Grass, as in lawn, is one that has always bothered me. No particular reason except to my ear it sounds harsh, meaningless, and anything but lush and green.

Grunt. My characters never grunt. Unless one is a really odious human being or a real pig. (I don’t think I’ve ever written about pig though I did write about a cow, but it never grunted.) In fact I don’t know why we can’t call grass grunt and vice versa. “Look how green that grunt is,” the man grassed.

When my young spongy mind was trying to make distinctions, while at the same time grouping words and ideas together, grunt fell into the scatological column and has never climbed out of it.

Does. A very useful word, but odd, even funny sounding. To my ear does should be the name of a detergent or a bar of soap. “Watch Does Bubbles work their magic on the dirtiest of stains.” Or maybe the gruntiest of stains?

If dyslexia is a problem, “does” can be a big problem. It can easily turn into dose and hide there for those of us who have to take a moment to un-jumble. Jumble is a perfect word. It sounds exactly like what it means. And I love the way it spills out of the mouth causing the speaker to actually feel the word.

I detest “spurious” because it’s a spurious word. Or maybe I detest the people who use it since they are mostly “intellectuals” or politicians. It’s sounds haughty and petty. It’s meant to stop any discussion. I read a review of a book in the Los Angeles Times last Sunday where the critic must’ve of used the word five times. What? He can’t come up with a synonym?

Synonym is another word that disturbs me. I like this word, but I admit to having never learned to spell it correctly. When I attempt to write it, I toss in a lot of m’s and o’s but never enough y’s. Then I hit spell check and hope I’m close enough to the word so it will correct it for me. I also have trouble pronouncing it. This problem comes from childhood again. I could never pronounce the very delicious word cinnamon, so how could I possibly pronounce synonym? Actually, when I said cinnamon it came out closer to symomnin. (Oops, spell check didn’t get that one) Since there aren’t many synonyms for cinnamon I would always hurry over the word, mumbling slightly or coughing. At least in a bakery I could point.

Gas station. I don’t dislike either word. Though you would think I’d hate the word gas being so close to grass and grunt. But I don’t. There is nothing logical, or even intelligent going on here. Together, these two words give me pause. I grew up in an era where we actually played with toy gas stations. We’d push our little cars into the bays and pretend to fill them up and zoom off. Yes, we actually thought gas stations were good places like churches. I was bigger than the toy station so I had an omniscient view of it. Today, gas stations are still toy-like for me. Except when I try to fill up my car. Then everything becomes cumbersome and uncontrollable and my God-like view quickly evaporates leaving me feeling more like a child than when I was one.

None of my likes or dislikes makes any sense except to me. Oh, oh, there is another word—sense. Since makes more sense. First of all it was easier to spell when I was little. The letter ‘c’ helped. And since we do use the same word for different meanings (such as duck, a word I do like) I never understood why we couldn’t use since for sense. I always felt my teachers made these words similar just to confuse me. What nonsince!

I could go on but I have other things to right. I mean write. That’s another word . . .