Mono-Disyllabic Shame

No trivialities have the power to induce more self-loathing than the fact that I keep stumbling over short words which meanings seemed to have gone past my attention in previous books, essays, writings, song titles, or simply... band names.

More than occasionally, I would come across words consisting of not 5 but 4 and even 3 letters I thought I would've known but in fact didn't and I don’t know why. I would search my memory for any helpful reminiscence while at the same time process the excruciating disbelief. At last, stuck somewhere between shame and a pinch of excitement prior to the learning of new words, I'd reach over for the ever blessed Mini Oxford Dictionary or--ever since my owning of the ADD-triggering device a.k.a Blackberry--the very handy Dictionary.com application.

Words so short and simply spelled, so impossible to forget, and yet there I was, browsing the net for definitions, synonyms, and sentence example, words my pride forbids me from revealing. So simple are these words one will think they would have been automatically injected in one’s mind since kindergarten, the kind of words you’d think, no, you’re so SURE you have been automatically equipped with. That it should have been repeated so many times by a certain English teacher at least in middle school, as he/she tried to convince students that it will, it very much will come in handy in the future. A very kind effort I haplessly ignored. And at that, would you just imagine the pain that stings as I stumble through ex-classmates’ writings, with those short words, be them nouns or adjectives, just meaningfully written across the page. And suddenly, middle school classes began making sense.

Words so effortlessly created (it seems), I actually started typing random combination of four letters, hoping they would appear to have a certain undiscovered meaning. And even if they don’t, maybe I could give them meaning and contribute to create an easier, much simpler, efficient English world (for Twitter’s 140 characters limit, the latter might better fit).

Oh the personal shame of realizing how far I am from becoming the vocabulary queen. Not without knowledge of all the simplest (synonyms for ‘simple’, anyone?) words.



P.S. Random question before I continue my mind rant and random typing of four letter combination on Google. What is it that make big words? The number of letters? Its meaning? Its rare use? Anyone but Google? Thanks.