New Vocabularies

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

A friend of mine just finished a major renovation project in her home, and this took months, and her friends and I were following all of her progress on Facebook.

Recently, she made a really interesting post.

Backsplash. Shoe molding. Quarter sawn oak. Sconce. Grout. Bullnose.

Trying to think about how many times I’ve spoken those words in the last few weeks, compared to how many times I’ll say them in the future.

I may never say bullnose again in my whole life.

Wow.

So she’s got this temporary vocabulary that comes from having to have this intense experience of renovating her house.

Yeah.

To me, it sounded like poetry.

To me, it sounded exotic.

It does.

What’s a bullnose?

I’d love to know what a bullnose is.

I think it has to do with tile.

And she even said, because I got all excited about it, she said there’s even such a thing as demi-bullnose.

Oh, very nice.

Something to do with the shape maybe of the tile.

Yeah, yeah.

We’ll have to look that one up.

Maybe a corner tile or something like that.

But there are these parts of our lives as we get older where we encounter new vocabulary in big buckets.

It just pours in when you went to college, right?

Well, yeah.

Or take a new job.

Yeah, or get a pet.

Or maybe you get diagnosed with a medical condition and you become this reluctant expert.

And all of a sudden, all these words that never mattered to you before suddenly do.

When I had a baby, as a matter of fact, when we had our baby, all of this new language from the books and the classes and even the experience itself, I didn’t know that before, nor did I need to know it.

There was a post on Facebook just recently where a man says, meconium, I just learned this new word that I’ll never need to know again.

I’m like, I know that word because when my son was born, that was an important word for me to know, meconium.

And the only reason I know that word is because it comes from the Greek word for poppy, because it derives from the Greek for poppy juice, which is brown.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It’s a baby’s first poo.

Right.

But the thing is that all of a sudden you get a bucket of words dumped on you like that, and then you can’t ever imagine not knowing them.

Yeah.

It’s crazy.

And when you start following a new sport or you have a new hobby, heck, when you have a new girlfriend or boyfriend, right?

Or you marry into a family who comes from a different part of the country or a different part of the world.

All this new stuff floods in.

You embrace it.

You know, if you want to talk to us about that, give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Describe the experience that you had where all this new vocabulary came pouring in all at once.

You can also tell us an email, words@waywordradio.org.