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Another funny thing about words is how differently the same
words are spelled in the US and in the UK. When I was a little girl, reading Charles
Dickens, I would spell color as colour at school. I can remember the teacher
telling me I was wrong. I knew I wasn’t wrong. I insisted that was how to spell
it. Nope, she won, and it wasn’t until I reached adulthood that I learned we
just spell things differently from one another. Honor is the same. Honor in the
US and honour in the UK.
Intrepid. Now, that’s a word. Our intrepid heroine. It means
fearless or adventurous. Like Danny Dunn, the hero in a series of books I read
as a child. Danny Dunn got into all sorts of scraps. He was a scholarly dude,
my same age, and could figure out problems (or crimes) like nobody’s business.
I particularly remember with fondness, “Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine”.
That was published in 1958, so it had been around a bit before I got busy
reading it.
I can remember people making fun of nerds at school. These
were the people who read the dictionary or one of their textbooks at lunch
instead of horsing around with their friends. I can remember, to my shame,
making fun of them myself when I secretly wanted to be one. Maybe I should write
a story about that.
Nerds also wore glasses. I can remember when I got my first
pair of glasses. I cried. I remember looking up at a tree once we had exited
the store to look at the leaves on a tree. I could see them. It was amazing. It
also improved my hearing because I could then read people’s faces. I didn’t
know that was what I was doing at 11 years old. To this day, even as my hearing
has gotten worse as an old lady of 70, if I’m not looking at you, many times I can’t
hear what you are saying.
What?
That was my feeble attempt at making a joke. I would imagine
to write jokes, or, at least, humorous pieces, you could do what people call a
play on words. Humorous is also an interesting word. If you were to spell humor
in the US, it’s got five letters. Spell it in the UK, it would be spelled as humour.
Humorous is spelled the same in both countries.
Here’s a word I did not know until I was an adult in my 30s.
Penultimate. I was talking to a friend, and he said it. I lost all sense of
what we were talking about, demanding he say it again and tell me what it
meant. It means the last possible thing before the last thing happens. So, the next-to-last
thing. You could say, “In the penultimate moment, she changed her mind about getting
married.”
It’s also interesting how words are pronounced. Another word
I learned to say correctly as an adult was "pastel". I was talking to
my mother about material. I said pastel, as a person in the UK would say it.
She corrected me, and from that moment on, I knew how to say it and, more
importantly, was embarrassed for having been mispronouncing it all those years.
Except, when I went looking for the diacritical marks to use in this article
just now, came upon a YouTube
video from the Cambridge Oxford Dictionary where they pronounced the word
as a British person would say it and as an American would say it. All those
years? I’d been pronouncing it correctly, though not as an American. As a
British person would. Go figure. So, Paste el in the UK and Past el in the US.
Both are spelled the same as pastel. A soft, pale color.
It's funny about pronouncing things. I lived in Norway for
three years as a child. When we returned to the US, I took a Spanish class. The
teacher took me aside and said, “You’re the only person I know who speaks
Spanish with a Norwegian accent.”
Here’s another grouping of words to describe groups: A
clowder of cats. A kindle of kittens. A flock of birds. A herd of elephants or
horses. A school of fish. A pod of whales. A pack of dogs or wolves. A swarm of
bees.
You could spend a lot of time on interesting words. I like
how you can suss out the meaning of a word from the context of the sentence. In
this case, suss means to figure something out. The origin of the word? Of
course, it is from British English, from the word "suspect". It came
about from British police slang from the 1930s to the 1950s.
I could go on and on about words. In fact, I keep a Word
document full of interesting words that I might, sometime in the future, use to
make videos for kids on my other YouTube channel, The Best Stuff for Kids.
Thanks for reading. I’ve listed a bunch of other places where
I am on the Internet below.
Peace out.
🌺 Pauline
Evanosky
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