If you are anything like me, you encounter words in contexts that are unfamiliar now and then. Maybe you even encounter words that are completely unfamiliar. At other times, you may read something that makes you wonder whether some word is being misused. These kinds of things happen to me several times a month.
When I was younger, I often just shrugged when these things happened – no longer. Now, most often go to my iPhone’s dictionary app or perhaps to Google. I want to know what the hell it means! Maybe that’s part of growing up?
Most mornings, part of my pre-ablution rituals is doing the NYT Spelling Bee puzzle. Sometimes the pangram (a 7+ letter word using every letter in the puzzle) just jumps off the screen. Other times, it takes me three or more minutes of assembling letters algorithmically to find the pangram(s). Occasionally, Susan and I are totally stymied by the puzzle. We hate it when that happens! In those instances, we often resort to making up words which we then attempt to define – as if we were making new entries in the dictionary. This often leads to a lot of giggling.
I remember doing a FB game some years ago. The game was a test of American History that purported to determine whether the participant was a Patriot. Let me say up front that although I made A’s in middle and high school History, I probably made a B in college American History. Not surprisingly, my score on the game was less than stellar. I commented that the test was a test of American History rather than a test of Patriotism. In the run-up to Trump’s election, there was no want of Trump followers to flame me for not being patriotic. Sigh.
A few nights ago, I saw an MSNBC interview of Caroline Randall Williams – author, poet and academic whose bio is in the link provided. During the interview, discussing the MAGA faithful, she asked the rhetorical question, “What does it mean to be American?” She observed that her DNA analysis had revealed that she had genes from Ireland, Germany, Africa and Ghana (where our VP had recently visited). She added that none of her genome was Native American (First Peoples of the Americas) – mine was 20%+ Northern Mexico indigenous. She went on to define what it meant to her to be American.
To be American, she explained, was to internalize and be faithful to certain ideas and beliefs. It wasn’t about bloodlines. Those ideas included things such as deeply held convictions regarding our form of government, our ideas of justice, the ideals of human rights, and the like. It was the most lucid definition I have ever heard for the word American.
For grins, I went to the dictionary app which gives a number of definitions for the noun American – among them descendants of the native peoples of North, Central and South America. It also listed the meaning of “a citizen of the US – a fairly weak definition given the behavior of some partisans on Jan 6.”
I don’t know about you, but I like Professor Williams’ definition better.