The Word

[Peg Herring]

When I was in high school, they called me the walking dictionary due to several factors: I always loved words, as did my mom, and I was on the debating team. My vocabulary was always being stretched by one or more of those things, and like coins deposited in a piggy bank, I kept adding to it.

Then I taught high school for thirty years, which tended to push me in the opposite direction. I had to keep putting things into terms that tenth graders could grasp, which meant I didn't use a lot of the words I knew, didn't need a lot of the words available. Now there's the age thing, which means I can't make things come to the surface when I want them: names, where I put something, and just the right word.

It's like this. I'm writing along at warp speed, brilliance dripping from my fingertips, and I come to a spot where there is a word, a perfect word, that needs to go into place. But I can't think of it. I know it exists, I know I know it. I just can't make the locating synapses fire.

Roget is my friend at that point, of course, but sometimes I can't even come up with the synonomous equivalent. I sit fumbling through the thesaurus, repeating the phrase just before the cursor, trying to get close. Eventually I leave *** in that spot and go on, knowing it just isn't the right time. On an edit, a day or a week later, the word usually comes up easily, as if it never hid itself away in a fold of brain matter.

So I am no longer the walking dictionary. I am more like the waddling wordsmith, aware of the richness of English but unable to cash in because my piggy bank has too many holes in it.