Excerpts from A Biography of My Vocabulary

When my brother was little he wore hiking boots without socks all summer, and refused to use any item whose purchase he was old enough to remember. He decided to call any funny looking car we saw on the highway an "apple strudel." Today my divorced parents maintain nothing in common except certain habits of diction. They're equally likely to say "you can't tell the players without a program," for instance. And they have the same power to momentarily reconstruct an intimate community by turning to me in the passenger seat as we pass a mattress roped to the top of a Volkswagen. "Look Ann," mom will say, or dad will say, "a real apple strudel."

I thought "blithe," with its long slippery vowel sound, like a salamander slipping back into the lake after a failed adventure, was a word for sadness.

Every time I used the word "canoe," my parents chimed in, "Can you canoe?" with goofy smiles. For a long time, I believed puns were an awkward family secret, something they'd invented.

My mother drove home from community college complaining that a woman in her class had skipped school to embroider a Christmas tree ornament shaped like a carrot. The carrot became my personal symbol for nonchalant idleness, or lack of urgent purpose.

The fourth grade teacher, who was having me read words aloud for a test, pointed to "chic" on the card. I felt trapped in the small space between knowing how to pronounce it and knowing the mistake she expected me to make pronouncing it. I said nothing because showing off would have been a horrible violation of my own privacy.

See fuzzy.

The other six words I remember from ninth grade biology are crustacean, paramecium, lepidoptera, endoplasmic reticulum, and sometimes annelid.

If I wasn't too shy to speak anyway, I might have embarrassed myself by accidentally saying "contraceptive," instead of "contrapositive," in response to Mrs. Leslie's question in geometry class, the difference between the two terms not having settled in my mind. So many times, hesitancy protects me from embarrassment.

"It's a cow!" I reported from my car seat, delighted. I had only seen pictures in animal books for children, but didn't doubt for a moment that this beast in the field was the real deal. I've never again applied information from books to wide-open outdoor landscapes with such unfettered self-confidence.

There were a few weeks in the sixth grade when I had heard the word "cynical" just enough times to be almost ready to use it myself. I had been accumulating a sense of the word. It sat heavily in my mind like fertilizer poured unevenly from a bag, like a fault line seconds before any scientist thinks to predict an earthquake. Ten years later I'd reached the same point with "metonymy."

See Huey.

I assume most three letter words I don't know refer to obscure relatives of the emu.

See shoes.

Matthew, on his way to art class, passed me in the hall with huge sheets of poster board flapping under one arm. "I have a cardboard fetish," he chirped, sharing his good mood. I had no idea what the word meant, but made a mental note with patient resignation.

I was certain that firemen set the fires, probably randomly, but never feared my house would be next. I accepted that the world was dangerous, and my own life inexplicably, imperturbably safe.

The high point of teaching public speaking one summer was an international student who temporarily confused the words "fuzzy" and "chubby." He claimed his diet-obsessed younger sister worried about turning fuzzy.

I still confuse "gainsay" and "vouchsafe" because they have the same emotional tone.

My parents and Mr. Rogers were the only people in the world who used the words "special" and "fancy" without a trace of irony. And they always said "supper," instead of "dinner," as if deciding anew every day to avert their eyes from romance. Because my mother always asked me to bring her the hair clips, never the barrettes, "barrette" came to symbolize everything risqué and mysterious. Wearing them, as opposed to hair clips, would be charged with excitement, as erotic as trying on heels or shoveling down junk food at other kids' houses.

Great grandpa Simonavicius was strapped to his bed, still willing to smile and give Life Savers. I'd heard he'd had a heart attack, so assumed heart attacks had something to do with being tied down.

When I was four, my brother's yellow squeak toy hedgehogs inspired me to write a song. It went: "Hedgehogs, dee da dee dee!, Hedgehogs dee da dee dee!" (repeat as often as seems necessary).

"Hey, Huey, Dewey and Louie, time to eat," my father would call from the foot of the stairs. I loved this, because actually there were only two people available to call, my brother and me. Years later when I told Matt this story, he wanted to know if dad ever called a group of more than three people "Huey, Dewey and Louie." I said I suppose it's possible, technically speaking, though personally I'm more inclined to use the phrase as hyperbole than understatement.

Margot grew up certain "inchoate" meant full of rage.

See Huey.

In the mid 1970s children weren't simply seen without being heard anymore. Dinners were more like talk shows with parents as co-hosts and kids as guests, each responsible for filling a segment about the ups and downs of her or his day. When my brother was in Montessori school, his dinnertime remarks sometimes mentioned a friend of his named Michelle Mushroomcake. If he hadn't casually mentioned that her parents kept her in a garbage can, it might never have dawned on us that she was his imaginary friend.

I sat in the tub thinking the dictionary's illustration for the word "nonsense" had to be a bright red slice of watermelon standing upright on its rind. This was my first experience of the concept "icon."

I have no idea why my mother taught me the word "opaque" so early in life. I folded it into my brain at about the same time as "school," "brother," and "yucky," instead of waiting around for "dashing," "soluble," and "frontispiece."

I let Margot have "peamop" in Scrabble because it cracked me up.

"Stop needling your brother," Woozle's parents used to tell his sister Jessica, when the two of them were trapped in the back seat of the station wagon for family drives to the beach. Jessica insisted for miles that the hotel signs didn't say "Ramada Inn," but instead "Ramad, a Inn." Woozle couldn't convince her otherwise.

Lyn told me that her grandmother never said "roast" without a tender adjective preceding it. It was never just "roast," but always "a lovely roast," and always a lovely roast of something, as in the phrase "a lovely roast of beef."

On the bus to day camp, a counselor told ghost stories about Russian spies. It took dad a long time to calm me down that night. He had to explain what a Russian spy was, and tactfully add that they had no interest in me.

"Daddy has sexy toes," I announced at age two, from one corner of my parents' extra-long king size bed. I was just snapping what words I had together with careless abandon, as if racing myself to hitch up giant plastic beads. Just as now I don't need to understand a joke to laugh for real, I knew then that the meanings of words were not quite the point.

Every morning at breakfast the radio announced how many "chairs" had been "traded on the New York stock exchange." I assumed that each day a ship loaded up with folding chairs, wooden yard sale chairs and a couple of old arm chairs sailed into New York, probably docking near the Statue of Liberty. And anyone who needed furniture ran down to meet it, open armed.

Anna, for whom the worst imaginable punishment is removal of socks and shoes before bed, has always been obsessed with feet and their accoutrements. At two, she reeled with shock and indignance when her dad made passing reference to her feet when she had shoes on, saying "no... no... no... not feet, shoes." Shoes and feet, feet and shoes, apparently this is an important state not to be belittled by sloppy thinking and imprecise vocabulary.

When the Watergate hearings were on TV, my father started calling everyone Spiro, usually in phrases such as "Thanks, Spiro!" (as I tossed him his keys) or "Nice shot, Spiro!" (under the driveway basketball hoop). I stole this phraseology for myself when I left for college - along with towels from the linen closet and extra cutlery. I took to calling it the "comma Spiro construction."

"Oh, Spiro!" I now say to Margot on the phone when she's slam dunked a particularly cutting remark. It's the name we have for each other that means "buddy," not lover or biographer or confidante. Nicknames for Spiro are spiro-ette, spirochyte, Spironymous Bosch and spirolina.

"Singing in the shower, I felt stimulated," "Singing in the shower is always stimulating," I wrote in ninth grade English the day were supposed to write sentences demonstrating the difference between participle and gerund. The class laughed when I read mine aloud, but my fierce, unspoken argument was that the word "stimulation" was not necessarily sexual. It could just as well stand for spiritual inspiration. My sentences were a stubborn public insistence on this belief, a tiny sit-in on paper.

At a certain age, Margot assumed "no U-turn" signs were meant as a strict if kindly directive: no, you turn. She was an only child, so she was accustomed to constructive criticism from parents, and used to sentences starting with "no."

Matt used to think the spoken word "vay/KAY/shun" and the written word "vacation" were completely different entities. Yes, they meant about the same thing, but this was coincidence.

When I told Dana that Vietnam is my earliest political memory she said yes, her too. She remembers the summer she heard two words over and over again on the radio: "vitamin," and "Vietnam." She got them confused, kept not quite remembering which had the positive and which the negative connotations.

See gainsay.

I blew up at Margot when she said "We spent three hours arguing about where to go for dinner," and it turned out "we" meant her and Steve, not her and me, though at that exact moment she was talking only to me. It's always rude to make the person you're talking with invisible by denying her the status of "we."

For over two decades I never got around to just plain noticing that the sun comes up in the east and sets in the west. If a word problem on the SATs required me to know in which direction the sun sets so I could draw the proper diagram, I had to sing "Hey I've never seen the sun come up in the... West?" from The Muppet Movie, in order to figure out that if it doesn't come up in the west then OK, it must set there. Verbal constructions have long been the Braille I use to get by in a world constituted by laws of physics.

My brother called the sticks he collected from the yard "winnebagoes."

The Sunday school workbook instructed me to "draw a picture of God's word." But by mistake I read "draw a picture of God's world," and covered the entire page with a crayon butterfly. The teachers, not grasping my error, decided I'd come up with an unusually abstract and precocious interpretation of scripture.