Claire from San Antonio, Texas, has a story about misunderstanding a word when she was young. When she saw a book with thesaurus on the cover, she grabbed it and started reading, thinking she was about to learn about a new type of dinosaur. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Thesaurus Misunderstanding”
Claire Moore in San Antonio, Texas writes,
When I was in second grade in the 80s, we would usually stop in the bookstore after a dinner out. It was a small local place, and we would all wander off to our favorite sections to find something new.
On my way to the kids’ shelves, I was intrigued by the tiny orange and white books on another shelf titled Thesaurus. I immediately thought, dinosaurs! And cool tiny books, so I went to check them out.
My mom found me 20 minutes later sitting on the floor in the reference section and laughing hysterically. She was pretty puzzled when she realized I was reading a thesaurus and that I really wanted to buy it. This is full of words that mean the same thing, and they sound really funny.
Listen to this. Pulchritudinous. You know what that means? Beautiful. She says, I still have that pocket thesaurus over 30 years later. It opened a window into the world of language that I happily climbed through and never looked back.
I’m a speech therapist now, sharing language with those who struggle with it, and I dabble in learning other languages as well. Aww. She’s a fellow nerd. She’s one of us. Oh, yay. How about that? And helping other people, too.
Claire, I love that story. Yeah. I love that little kid seeing thesaurus and thinking, oh, boy, raptors and T-Rex. Marvelous pulchritudinous. This is one of her first encounters. Pulchritudinous dinosaurs. Thank you for that, Claire. Thanks, Claire.
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