My Dictionary, John Zurz

For my seventeenth birthday a friend of mine gave me a most unusual gift: a subscription to a series of a word a day e-mails. It almost made me feel like those people who buy those calendars that give them a new word each day to help them expand their vocabularies. I say almost because those people tend to use their new words incorrectly and or at the wrong times. And so for the last year I have been getting these e-mails with different words in them.
For the longest time I had used a dictionary my mother bought me when I was in grade school, it is one of those dictionaries with the words most people use, one without fluff words. By fluff words I mean words that aren’t in a person’s essential vocabulary. After all who would call a kindergartener learning his ABC’s an abcidian? Odds are they wouldn’t understand and neither would most people. It evokes an image of a class of geniuses who are trying to find the meaning of life, not your average kindergarten class. In the dictionary my mother bought me I went and looked up words that I needed to know for vocabulary tests and such. When middle school came I began looking at certain four letter words that one begins to hear on TV and such. While we all now know what “hump” means there was a time in each of our lives when we merely thought that it was a small hill, bump, or that thing on the back of the old man drinking beer outside of the corner store.
It may sound odd to be talking this way so soon, but remember I am a teenager and as most people that looked through dictionaries was because it could be reasoned that they might have pictures or descriptions of said four letter words. As it goes the “S” section of my dictionary was the first to become worn. The others were soon to follow. You can always tell what kind of dictionary you have by the definitions of the words in it: the more primp; conservative dictionaries will give the bare minimum when it comes to defining certain words. The other kind would give slightly more detailed definitions, while they do not come close to the Urban Dictionary, they are quite telling. It’s funny how the way the dirty words are defined will tell you what kind of product you are looking at.
For the longest time words have been giving negative connotations when they do not deserve them. Since when did liberal become a four letter word? Or even conservative for that matter? ‘Son’ now can be used to refer to a friend or acquaintance, and has been for a few years. Pop culture has influenced our vocabulary more than we think. A character of the popular show The Simpsons, Homer’s catch phrase has been added into the dictionary. Now and forever “Do’h” has been immortalized as a word to be used when someone screws up or hurts themselves. The primp dictionaries won’t have it, but if you want to know what “Hunky Dory” means odds are it will be in there.
The same friend that gave me the present of the e-mails that bring me new and pretty words to use has a vocabulary to match. All of the words she uses are nice and pretty, she may curse every now and again but she sounds much more natural when speaking with her flowery vocabulary. I suppose that is the kind of vocabulary one gains when they like to write poetry. As for myself I am constantly using words I never even knew I knew how to use when I am writing. It may seem odd but none of them are large words, they all seem to be quite short, quaint even. I am no poet nor do I pretend to be, I have no pretty words to use. While they some may be quaint, they all sound rough, even when I use the nicer sounding words they always seem to come out jagged.
For some reason when I write anything I tend to ignore the word “stuff”. When teachers would go over our work they would say don’t use “stuff” or “things”. In writing these two words have become as bad as curses, they are not to be used, while when speaking no one ever says “don’t say stuff”. There seems to be a disconnect, both are ways of communicating, of expressing an idea so what goes for one should go for the other. Shouldn’t it?
I suppose the word a day e-mails may be considered the most useful present I have received in my long eighteen years of life. I especially enjoyed the week where they used words that sounded dirty but actually weren’t. Though they may not have been useful, (When would be the right time to ask someone if they were masticating?) it was certainly entertaining. I may not be in bated breath, but I certainly look forward to seeing what new gem is in my inbox tomorrow morning.