WORDS

I’ve always been fascinated with correct pronunciation of difficult words. I look them up in my huge unabridged Random House Dictionary.

Humiliation is a familiar feeling to a person who learns words by reading rather than by hearing them in conversation. The first time I was humiliated for pronouncing a word wrong was when I asked Dad why he didn’t get some MAN-ure to use as fertilizer. He puzzled over it for a minute, then gently explained that man-OOR was what he shoveled up in the barn and dumped onto the farm crops. But he couldn’t conceal his amusement.

Spelling can be another source of humiliation for a word lover. I nearly won the county-wide seventh grade spelling bee on the radio in Astoria. When I realized it was me against Wanda Biggs for the final word, I froze. The word was exaggerate, a word I could easily spell. But my mind went blank. “E-g-g-s-?” I began. The moderator, seeing my panic, tried to help. “No, EX-aggerate.” I searched frantically in my tortured mind and came up with “E-c-k-s …?” At which point he turned to Wanda. “Wanda?” She tossed her hair, stepped up to the microphone and rattled it off. The letter X, that’s what I couldn’t find. I wanted to die. Wanda smirked, her favorite expression. That was a humiliation I clearly have issues about to this day. At our 50-year class reunion Wanda brought her red chiffon prom dress, and hung it on a divider in the center of the room. Then she laid out on tables all of her angora sweaters, complete with the scarves she had tucked into the neck back in the Fifties; and the earrings she had worn with each outfit. She stood to make an announcement: “Everything here still fits me perfectly.”
That was obviously true—but…Why?

Another humiliation I still have issues about happened the night before my first cancer surgery. My then-husband brought his mistress over to share a bottle of wine and “comfort” me. Since I couldn’t eat or drink anything I tried to make conversation with her. I used a word which I had read but never used in conversation. I pronounced it BANE-ul. She flashed a quick, amused look at my soon-to-be-ex-husband, and finally, encouraged by his grin, laughed out loud. “Do you mean ban-OWL?” I’ll never mispronounce that word again. In fact, I’ll never use that word again.

Jack, my husband for the last twenty-eight years, never smirks, or smiles, or grins if I mispronounce something. I haven’t felt pronunciation humiliation for ages.

Now if I only knew for sure how to pronounce “vapid.” My Unabridged Dictionary says it’s vapp-id, but the online Webster’s says it could also be pronounced vaypid.

And flaccid. There’s a word for which I have used the secondary pronunciation, flassid, like everyone else, until I looked it up and found that the preferred pronunciation is flak-sid. Not that it’s a word anyone regularly uses. I may never use that word again, either.
Now try to get that word out of your head.