Big Words

Say That Again Please?

I just had a flash to the first big word I ever learned. It was prevaricate. I was watching the first episode of season five of Luther on BritBox. One of the bad guys said it, but he said, “prevarifuckcation”. That’s when I flashed back on the word.

I don’t know how old I was. I don’t know where I learned it from. I know it wasn’t my parents. They never used big words with me. I remember they talked to me infrequently. There were five children in the family, and my mother was always very busy. My father was always at work. That’s how it was. By the way, if you don’t already know, prevaricate means to speak evasively, to tell a half-truth, essentially to lie, but more like a dance. To dance around the truth, making it a lie. Or to tell a lie sneakily. I believe I did that a lot, anyway. Good to know what I was doing way back then.

If I were to guess, I must have been reading a book. I always liked to read. My parents had a collection of Reader’s Digest Condensed books I would nip into. I read grown-up books when I was in the 5th grade. My mother told me I couldn’t read them, but I read them anyway. They were her library books. I remember reading one about the black death, the plague in Europe in medieval times. I just purchased two books on Amazon, Daniel Defoe’s, “A Journal of the Plague Year” published in 1722, and Albert Camus’ “Plague” published in 1947. I think it was one or the other that I read. I’m not sure. I decided to read them both. I got the Kindle versions. They were both 99¢.

I read another one when I was small, called “Intern” by Dr. X, which was all about an intern’s experiences in his first year as an intern after medical school. Names were evidently all changed to protect the innocent.

I remember learning about petechial hemorrhaging in that book, which can happen when a person is strangled. It’s when all the blood vessels in your eyes burst. You can also get petechial hemorrhaging on your skin, pinpoint red spots that never go away.

I’ve got them now. I’ve brought this condition to several doctors’ attention over the years, and they just shake their heads and say they don’t know what it is. Evidently, if you don’t spill a lot of blood or vomit in their laps, nothing much can be done.

This has been my own experience with medical doctors through the years. I remember when I was becoming diabetic and going through perimenopause at the same time, the doctor prescribed a pill for depression and suggested I seek psychotherapy. He said he didn’t know what was wrong with me. I was diagnosed with diabetes a few years later, but that is not unusual. Typically, people have diabetes a good seven years before anybody diagnoses it. In retrospect, it all seemed a pretty silly approach to a woman who was becoming more and more livid by the moment, but the therapy did help. So did the anger management course I took later on. I remember being concerned because I sat next to a park ranger who had just moved back to the big city from the woods. All she wanted to do was to shoot motorists. Now, that was scary.

So, all is well. I’m still on the anti-depressants. I am actually afraid to go off of them. The doctor initially prescribed them for me because I couldn’t sleep, which is one of the things that happen when you go through perimenopause. It was only years later, while I was reading the fine print on the 20 pages of literature that comes with the medication, that I learned it was an anti-depressant.

I also had a sign above my desk that said, “I have flying monkeys, and I know how to use them.” I used to point at it occasionally to make a point.

My mother helped me out as an adult when I made a reference to a pastel color. I was pronouncing it paste-el. She told me that it was correctly pronounced as past-el. Then, years later, a friend made a reference to a penultimate moment. I forget what we were talking about, but I asked him what it meant. He told me it meant the next to the last.

So, words are interesting. Do you remember the first big word you ever learned? And, thank you for reading. I had fun writing this piece.