I'm well-read, but not always well-said.
- kd
- Jun 18, 2018
- 3 min read
I am a voracious reader. I have been since I could read, I guess. In fact as a pre-teen, I used to lie in my bathtub atop comfy pillows (sans water) and read aloud. Something about the way you sound in the bath - your voice bounces or it's richer or something like that.
But when I would read aloud, there wasn't an audience. There was only me. And I thought I was great!
Flash forward a few decades to a lovely dinner with my family. We're laughing and chatting. We're enjoying the moment. And then I go and drop a bombshell of a word.
Lilliputian.
I'll put it in context for you. My mother is short. Her mother was shorter, so my mother thinks she's tall. She's not. And that's when I dropped the bombshell. I said, "Mom, you're Lilliputian!"
Nothing wrong there, right? A Lilliputian is a tiny person from the land of Lilliput. Gulliver knew them. I'd read about them. So, unfortunately, I'd said their name aloud. The way I thought it was pronounced. The way I skimmed it and kept reading. If my mangling of that word would be in the dictionary, it would've looked something like this:
My dad nearly choked on his shrimp. He turned, a buttery smile smeared across his lips, and said, "What?"
"What what?" I replied.
"What did you just say?" Dad asked.
"I called her Lil-lup-tian. You know, because she's so tiny - she's like the people from Lilliput." I couldn't see why he was having such a hard time with this. He was well-read.
"You mean Lil-li-pu-tian." (He, of course, said it correctly.) That was all he got out as he chuckled and bit into another juicy shrimp. My father - the English teacher turned high school principal - turned out to be well-said as well as well-read.
Each time I think about that night, I laugh. Each time I tell that story, I laugh. I've told my students that story every year. They laugh, too. But I use this story to help them to understand the bigger picture. How we pronounce a word isn't as important as how we understand the meaning of that word.
A very dear friend of mine a long time ago said something that sticks with me still to this day. We were talking and she mangled a word. She said, "Ped-uh-strain-ee-an" instead of how it should be pronounced. We laughed at that so long! And you know what? I can't think of the word the right way without thinking of the word the mangled way anymore!
I share that story with my kids every year, too. They're eight. They get it.
Words are powerful.
You can yell them. You can whisper them. You can bumble them around on your tongue and spit them out all garbled. But if the meaning is understood - they're powerful.
With this background, you'd think I'd shy away from spitting out words. (Well, truth be told, that wouldn't be a bad idea sometimes.....but that's a story for another day.) No, I don't hide my flaws very well. And when they reveal themselves, I usually laugh the loudest.
One day at a meeting, the presenter put up a power point slide that had a unique word on it. Then the presenter proceeded to read the slide aloud. In my head, I started to drift off, asking myself why people want to torture the audience this way. But then I heard something that smacked me back to the moment. The presenter said "peek" for the written word pique.
"What?" I asked my teammates.
"What what?" they whispered back.
Oh, they laughed and laughed when I told them I thought the word was pronounced "pick-you" and not "peek." I even had to duck over to the dictionary and look it up - not satisfied that my team knew what they were talking about. They did. I didn't.
But I do now.
So when I tell my students that part of the story - the part where the pedestrian Lilliputian's interest is piqued - they get it. They get me.
And they keep fearlessly reading onward.
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