Being Articulate and Stuff

I like to learn things. Let me put a qualifier on that. I like to learn some things. Learning how to properly eviscerate a large woodland creature for the sake of crawling into the fresh cavity in order to avoid freezing to death on the frozen tundra of an area of the world from which one can see Russia, is of no interest. Learning how to use such phrases as “properly eviscerate” and “frozen tundra” in the same sentence is. Now, if I could only learn how to add the phrase “a touch of whimsy” to the same sentence I would feel truly fulfilled.
Education was highly valued in my family. This did not mean my folks fussed about grades or cracked a whip as we did homework. My mother did try to help me. The difficulty for my mother was not the work. It was the attention level of her pupil, who could often be found playing with the honey filled bear left on the kitchen table while she slaved over quadratic equations. She learned algebra. I learned if you squeeze the bear just right the little plastic stopper can reach gravitational escape velocity.
Since the job which allows me to pay my mortgage is in education I probably shouldn’t say this, but maybe I can get some of that bailout money if I get fired. My father used to say school was ancillary to education. The very fact that he used the word “ancillary”, properly, in a sentence reinforces the fact that smart was important to him. I think he meant school is important for getting a good education, but if you only actively try to learn within the confines of those ubiquitous blond brick buildings you will not be a fully educated person.
Learning new words has always been a pursuit of mine, in and out of school. I like finding words which really express something in a very precise way. The French have term for this. I think it is “c’est la guerre”. Nope, that’s wrong. Maybe, “pate de foie gras”? That’s not it. I need just the proper word, the perfect fit, le mot juste. Oh, well, I guess I’m not going to remember.
People who try to throw words around in order to put lipstick on a pig (sorry couldn’t resist) bug me. The other day I was at a meeting and there was a whole set of things we were to do. One of them was to write down our thoughts on a “tuning protocol”. I found out that was a piece of paper divided into categories. After that we were to spend some time on “silent reflection”. Back in my day we simply called it “thinking”.
I learned a new word earlier this week reading the New York Times online. This electronic newspaper has the coolest feature. If you’re reading an article and you come across a word you do not know (which is to be expected while reading the big city left-wing elitest press) you can simply double click on the word and a screen pops up with a dictionary entry giving the pronunciation and definition of the word. If only those Green Lantern comics I read in my youth did that. The word I learned was “lacuna”.
Lacuna means an empty space or a missing part. The word was used to describe a certain politician’s gap in knowledge. Now you may ask of what use is it to know this word? Well, it was immediately obvious to me how I could use it. I could write the William F. Buckley version of a song from a Disney movie. It would be all about the voluminous empty spaces where intelligence should lie in the world of politics. A song telling the story of no WMDs, a missing Osama Bin Laden, and politicians who seem surprised that CEOs of big corporations could be greedy. I would call the song “Lacuna Matata”. No smarts, no worries.
It just doesn’t seem the general population values intellect. The word intellectual is used as an epithet. The dictionary in my computer says the word means: having a highly developed ability to think, reason, and understand. Call me crazy, but that sounds like something to aspire towards. But, no, intellectuals are thought of as pocket protector geeks only good for programming your TiVo, working on particle colliders in Switzerland, and being an expert witness in the trial of the cool guy in class who embezzled millions of dollars to maintain his trophy wife and jet setting lifestyle.