Words and Things

The other night I left a full glass of water elbow level for my husband. Right on schedule, it went flying, along with a great picture of my then six-year-old daughter, Princess, in full riding gear, sitting on top of a giant horse with my husband smiling alongside her. After the water was sopped up, I told my husband, “Oh, I love that picture of you two and that Chambray shirt you are wearing.”

“That’s not a word,” he stated.

“Of course, it is,” I replied my tone just a hint smug.

“You’re making that up.  I’ve never heard that word in my life.” By now he was giving me that look which meant that he had caught me making something up and couldn’t wait to tell the kids.

I googled it on my phone and tossed it to him. This time even my smile was smug. As I have pointed out a time or two here, I am not good at a lot of things; sports, technology, anything requiring patience and zeal…those sort of things, but I am good at/full of words. Yep, I was the cool kid who read the dictionary…for fun. No, I didn’t get stuffed in lockers, but I wasn’t too far up on the social scale from the kids who did.

It’s a fun trick to pull out when my scientific children are artfully conversing on medical issues in their field and it’s making my eyes cross in boredom when all of a sudden they use an obscure word that means exactly what I know it means…in the real world. It quite bedevils them.

My husband is sweet enough to think that this knowledge of mine makes me smart. He’s the one who can spend thirty minutes fixing our TV when after minute five, I’m ready to skip the process and just read a book. The other day our scanner (something I use hourly for work) stopped working. I did what I could. I turned the computer off and then back on. I swore at it, then announced that we needed a new scanner. My husband sat down at the computer and ordered it about for an hour and now the scanner is working.

“How did you do that?” I asked.

“I just tried everything until it worked,” he said.

See what he doesn’t understand is that my everything is less than 30 seconds. I don’t understand all the parts that make the computer, printer, scanner and whatever else talk to each other. He has the patience and the ability to go through all the layers until it works again. To me, this is what smart is.

I will always love words. Especially ones I rarely hear. Last night as I read the Alexander Hamilton book because I’m obsessed with the soundtrack and cannot wait to see the play, one page alone had three words I had never heard/read before. Yes, this is exciting for me. Autodidactic. Heterodox. And Puerile. And I’m only on page 60…glorious!

I’ll take my so-called word smarts and mix it with my husband’s everything smarts and be happy that we still impress each other in our own way.

As for the definitions.  Google them.