The first realization I had that I was in love with words came from a conversation with my dad when I was in middle school.
The conversation went something like this:
Me: I was being facetious.
Dad: Do you know what that word means?
Me: Sure. It means sarcastic.
My love affair with words, however, began long before that conversation. It began when my parents first opened a book and read to me. It deepened when they taught me to read the words on the page for myself. But it soaked in through everyday conversations with my dad (that’s him on the right in this picture at my college graduation).
My dad and I at my college graduation.
You see, my dad was a bona fide word geek. He loved words, especially words that no one else seemed to know, and he used them regularly. But he didn’t use them to make himself sound smarter than he was. He used them because, to him, they conveyed what he wanted to say. This regular use seeped into my siblings and I to the point where we would use them in everyday conversation too, and if Dad dropped a word in conversation that we didn’t know, he would say, “Look it up. I’ll spell it for you, but you’re going to look it up in the dictionary.”
And we had a massively thick dictionary on our bookshelf. My siblings and I got so used to using “big” words in everyday conversation that my mom, when I was in high school, looked at my dad and commented, “The only people who can understand you when you talk are college professors and your children.”
This love affair continued into my teen years, when I would write story after story for the sheer pleasure of it. I’m sure my peers thought I was weird, but what can I say? I had turned into a word geek.
That only worsened (?) when I took an etymology class in high school. For the uninitiated, etymology is simply the study of words. Yep, I spent a whole semester learning about the linguistic roots of words, whether they came from Greek, Latin, or some other source. And I enjoyed the heck out of it.
I could go on about how being a word geek enhanced my education as a vocal performance major in college and my stint as a pastor, but those are stories for another time. That’s the beauty of words. They never run out.
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