Our humor columnist becomes the heroine of a bildungsroman spun by her vocabulary-obsessed mom. And yes, we had to look it up, too.
Illustration by Jan A. Igoe
On a rainy June night somewhere in Oregon, a naked stranger climbed up on a railroad crossing sign and remained there for 12 hours, ignoring police invitations to come down. He had previously been running around throwing rocks at strangers, so the police were very interested in meeting him, according to news reports.
Somehow, considering the first half of 2020, a naked guy perched on a railroad sign barely qualifies as somewhat unusual on the world weird-o-meter.
Weird is when I find myself inexplicably clicking on the latest news about Chrissy Teigen ditching her breast implants. Or Snooki leaving Jersey Shore. Nothing about Chrissy’s boobs or Snooki’s feuds interests me. It’s the virus.
Stranded in my living room, I’ve been totally hug-deprived and lonely, despite the best efforts of several slobbering canine love machines. I understand why Tom Hanks was so happy to find a volleyball for company on that island. Everybody needs a Wilson.
Meanwhile, I amuse myself with dumb and dumber internet antics. You know what the latest selfie craze is? Women showing off their armpit hair, which makes me wonder if the hippies are mounting a comeback.
I grew up waiting a month to see what dad captured with his 24-shot roll of Kodak film, so there were no hairy pit portraits. Family photos were largely devoted to Christmas, birthdays or Mom’s meltdowns.
My poor mom was very intelligent, but she never went to college or had a job besides raising ungrateful kids. She would have made an excellent employee, assuming she could start as CEO, four-star general, or queen.
Suitable positions were hard to come by, so Mom had no outlet for the encyclopedias she inhaled or her “sesquipedalian” vocabulary—a Mom word—except her kids. She loved digging up obscure nouns and pompous adjectives that made everyday English seem like a foreign language. The more syllables, the better. Then she’d lie in wait, often baiting her trap with warm chocolate chip cookies, ready to spring an unrecognizable sentence on the first kid home from school. Mom’s cookies always had consequences.
I checked the hallway to see if she was lurking nearby. No one there. No one behind the refrigerator or under the table. The coast was clear. But as I tiptoed toward the cookies, her voice found me.
“Who’s your favorite rumbustious protagonist in a bildungsroman?”
Mom was very pleased to have caught a hungry child in her vocabulary net, confident that her selection of words nobody had uttered in 100 years would stump us. She was right.
“Are you asking for yourself or a friend?” I queried, stalling for time while my fourth-grade brain tried to reason it out. Something about Roman buildings, maybe. “Rumbustious” sounded too much like “rambunctious,” so that was probably a trick. I knew a protagonist was a hero. So she wanted a rowdy Roman who owned a building?
“Nero,” I said confidently, but Mom was already celebrating her victory and making that bad-answer-buzzer noise.
No cookies until I researched “bildungsroman.” (And this was before Google.) Turns out it’s a novel about the growth of the main character, who presumably was not Nero.
If Mom had been job hunting at the same time as Vanna White, things might have been different. She would have liked turning letters over and watching contestants struggle. But Mom could only go so long before strutting over to swat any dummies upside the head.
Even so, with Mom you got a free buzzer. But no cookies.
Raised by the Queen of Wordsmiths, Jan A. Igoe was being force-fed vocabulary words while other kids were spitting out strained peas. Please send cookies or write her at HumorMe@SCLiving.coop.