Pauline Evanosky

It’s interesting to me how I used to say things like, “I’ll get past this,” meaning it’s a hard spot or situation, and all I have to do is hold on tight enough, grit my teeth, and I’d get to the other side. It occurred to me just now that it’s not about moving past something; it's more about moving through things.

It’s a journey. What went before is not forgotten, nor was it unnecessary. I don’t want to forget what happened so much as have whatever went before be a part of the weft and weave of the present.

I suppose feeling more in control of my life at this point is what I am feeling. Before, I was a stone being thrown here and there in the ocean. I was reacting to things, some good and some bad. There was a polarization present.

Now, I’m wondering if everything that happened, the good, the bad, and the other, was a choice on my part and not just me being buffeted about.

I suppose I’m just trying to put it all into perspective. Besides, when you focus on one thing, you don’t easily notice the other stuff.

Perhaps, the trick is to have a center, a normal to return to. Perhaps, a bit of a ritual that happens periodically. For me, it is something that would need to happen once a day. If I don’t do it once a day, whatever it is, I tend to drift. I know, I’ve done it, time and time again.

It’s like a dream, where I nod off in my chair and as my head falls forward, I awaken, startled, and am back in the present.

I’m reminded of Thomas Edison, who, the story goes, would lie upon his workbench for a quick nap. He held some metal balls in one hand, and as he relaxed into his nap, the balls would fall to the floor and awaken him, refreshed and ready to go on inventing things.

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🌺 Pauline Evanosky

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I love words. I like how they can sound the same and have two meanings. Like wont and want. Wont would be an inclination. Want, of course, is that you desire something. It’s funny, but my spellchecker doesn’t like the way I spelled "wont." It doesn’t think it is a word, and yet I’ve known it as a word since I was a little girl reading Dickens.

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.

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