With
this change, feel free to expunge memories of your favorite analogies. “Obfuscation is to Eclipse as Perspicacity is
to Acumen” is now replaced by more prudent word comparisons, such as,
“Participation is to Trophy as Helicopter is to Parent.”
So much
for the millions of us who’ve sweated out the vocab for decades – we believed them
when they told us “palliate” and “adumbrate” would serve us well in life. We listened, memorized and prayed for those
words to show up one dismal Saturday morning in a gym where we’d slow-danced to
“Freebird” the week before, wondering if our girlfriends knew we were as
adumbrate as they come.
I took
an SAT prep course in the basement of the Roosevelt Field Mall on Long Island
in the fall of 1984 with a man named Mr. Leverage. He was partial to the math section, using catchy
mnemonic tricks like, “Boo, boo, radical two.”
I still have no idea what he meant but deserve points for using the word
“mnemonic.”
I’ve
made vocabulary an important part of my life and try working big words into
everyday conversation, much to the chagrin of my less-erudite consorts. For example, a friend tells a joke, and I’ll
exclaim, “What a pithy maxim!” passing along the encomium with brio and
delectation, relishing in our sagacious repartee.
But no
more - the era of big words is over, cast aside like mental detritus, and I’m
not happy. I wouldn’t mind creating an
occlusion with a dragooned piebald bunny in the College Board’s executive
washroom to manifest my disinclination at this calamitous development, but I
won’t. Instead, I propose we celebrate
our big words on one final day, using as many as we can before setting them
aside for posterity. I proclaim this
Wednesday to be “Big Words Wednesday,” a day to revel in the sublimity that is
a robust and expansive vocabulary.
All you
knackers, join hands with the coopers, fletchers, tanners and apiarists and
shout your métier to the welkin above on Wednesday, because come Thursday,
you’ll all be known as “people who work with their hands.” You fakirs, mendicants and supplicators, smile
and plead for succor - by the end of the week, you’ll just be straight-up bums
hassling drivers for loose change. Take
not umbrage with such assertions – surcease your harangue of my temerity as Big
Word Wednesday approaches with precipitancy, for we have work to do.
Perhaps
you should call in sick, instead why not gambol across a nearby heath in the
tarn’s direction so that you might witness a glorious coruscation in the eventide
firmament! Do it soon - if you try it
next weekend, you’ll be that dummy who skipped into the woods towards a big
cold puddle and almost got hit by lightning.
Spend Wednesday sounding the tocsin for a surfeited lexicon, for such vaingloriousness will end in a fat
lip given by a freshman in high school thrilled that his SAT test will be as
challenging as reading a Friendly’s menu.
I plan
on spending Wednesday fighting the ennui of what the future brings, eschewing
the more saturnine aspects of the world we’ll inhabit, refusing to wallow in
mawkish desolation for long, instead accepting the reality that future family
escutcheons will be festooned with tiny
images of TV remotes and Skittle colors instead of leather-bound books and
woodland sprites.
