The Cafeteria Lady — Where’s Webster When We Need Him?
by Martha Bolton
 I love the dictionary. No, I
haven’t read it from cover to cover like a book. (I tried
that once, but
only got as far as the C’s. There just wasn’t that much of
a plot.) Still,
I’m fascinated with words. Big ones, small ones, formal
ones, casual
ones. Words can help us say exactly what we want to
say, or they
can trip us up and cause us to say something we had
no intention of
saying. Such as when President George Bush said the
famous "Is
our children learning?" line. Or when baseball legend
Yogi Berra
said, "You should always go to other people’s funerals;
otherwise,
they won’t come to
yours."
Marion Barry, the former mayor of Washington, D.C.,
once said,
"Outside of the killings, [Washington] has one of the
lowest crime
rates in the country."
And actress/model Brooke Shields once remarked, "If
you’re killed,
you’ve lost a very important part of your life."
Words. What would we do without them?
That’s why I love the dictionary. The dictionary not only
gives
us the correct spelling of a word, but also what it means
and how we can
use it in a sentence.
Some words, though, are self-explanatory. You can
easily figure out
their definition by just looking at them. For instance:
flippant: an ant gymnast
gastrointestinal: the stomachache you
get after
paying a high price for gas
kaleidoscope: saying you used a
breath freshener
when you
really didn’t
cauliflower: Lassie’s garden
homage: the age of your house
category: a feline who likes horror
films
aggravation: getting upset with your
agriculture
teacher
politics: ticks that only attack
politicians
diversification: skipping the last verse of
a
song
abdication: giving up on ever having
good
abs
airborne: when a lady gives birth on a
747
incarnation: how a bee describes his
whereabouts
impunity: without a pun
subtraction: what you need to walk on
top of a
submarine
spectator: a potato whose eyes need
corrective
lenses
pacification: the study of surfers in
California
To the best of my knowledge, most of the above are
correct. But
then again, maybe dragging out the ol’ Webster’s
might not
be such a bad idea after all.
This article appeared in Brio
magazine. Copyright © 2001 Martha Bolton. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Illustration by Pat Binder.Hey, we'd love to have some feedback from you! If you've got a comment about this article, send it to Brio@briomag.com. Please include your name, age, mailing address and the title of this article.
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