6 Month the essay that started it all
Earlier this week, my coworkers and I went out for a staff dinner at The Boiling Crab. As the local driving aficionado, I offered to drive and pick up a couple people in my glamorous 2009 Ford Focus that still has the faint smell of a retired U.S. Marine with an addiction to cats and cigarettes, in that order. (I am open to any vacuum recommendations you may have.) As I was about to leave my apartment, I did my obligatory pee-just-in-case and from my more or less hygienically questionable positionality, I texted that I was on the way to pick up my first passenger.
J: okay nat can u give me like 7 minutes dhsjdbje No worries I’m meandering my way out V: i like that verb A: Bro fr needa talk to nat more A: I be expanding my vocabulary every time
To be completely honest, though, my usage of the word “meandering” was intended to be more sarcastic. Or funny? I didn’t get any “haha” reactions to my message, but at least to me, I thought using an inappropriately long word to say “I’ll take my time” was more entertaining. In my head, it sounded like I was a cowboy with a twang in his voice– “I–yim may-yan-der-in’ mye way aht”. Honestly, writing this feels like I’m painfully trying to explain a joke to a group of friends who are politely entertaining my incoherent thoughts, but at least I can go to sleep tonight knowing I at least tried to explain to my classmates that my intention while texting is not really to use the biggest words possible but to try to make jokes (and end up failing miserably). Now, writing the aforementioned story within the context of an English class also feels a bit… pretentious? Grandiose? Self congratulatory? Setting high expectations that I will inevitably fail to meet? One of the more popular (and humbling) methods of vocabulary expansion I’ve encountered recently is wordle. I’m someone who does the Wordle, quordle, octordle, sedordle, and semantle as soon as she realizes it is a new day (or 4pm for the semantle). Even if I feel like I have nothing to live for, my will to live can be boiled down to whether or not I have the daily opportunity to stubbornly stare at my screen and be relentlessly humbled by 5 letter words. Today’s Wordle was “month”. Though not necessarily a marker of vocabulary expansion, it was nonetheless a humbling experience. I guessed “monty” before I guessed “month”. I don’t even know what “monty” means. All that comes to mind is Monty Python and even then, the only thing I’d be able to tell
