Trying to Sound Smart

I remember when I was six years old and I wanted to sound just like my mama. I wanted to sound “grown up.” I would go around the house repeating what she said, so I could sound smart, but I would get it all mixed up. When I wanted to say “shirt” and it came out “shit,” though, that was the final straw. My mother sat me down and told me in no uncertain terms that if I couldn’t tell anyone the meaning of the word then I couldn’t say it. So that was the end of my career of swearing until much later in life.

However, I did take what she said to heart, which is when I started trying to read the dictionary. I discovered words like “aardvark,” “malevolent,” “solvent,” and “transition.” Sure, I couldn’t pronounce any of those words, but I sure knew what they meant, and I felt smarter for it. Then I got a word-of-the-day calendar when I was in sixth grade and that kept me on the path of knowledge. You could say I was hooked on verbiage, and the words just kept on coming.

By that point, I wasn’t even trying to sound smart anymore. I just wanted to know every single word I was likely to encounter out there in the big, wide world. That’s also when I began reading “adult” books. No, I’m not talking about the ones where there’s a naughty vicar and the lusty young wench has burning loins. I mean ones where there are more words than pictures, and you’re more likely to find a plethora of three- and four-syllable words than one-syllable ones. And I carried around my trusty pocket dictionary with me in order to keep up with the new words coming at me.

That’s when I met Garfield. Now, Garfield was a short guy with hair that was wild even though he had it cut often. We got to know each other at boarding school when we started there in ninth grade together. And from the first day I realized something interesting about the short guy with the wild hair. He wanted to sound smart. It was easy to see because he found ways to put “big” words into just about every sentence he said. It was also easy to see because he used every single one of those words incorrectly. For example…

“I was conjugated the other day, with all my superfluous…ness. Yeah boy. That’s what I finagled, you know what I’m spelunking?”

By the time I had explained to him just what each word really meant, he was already shaking his head and laughing at me. It turns out he didn’t care what they meant. He told me most other people don’t know either, so they just nod their heads when he talks and think he’s really smart. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that they were all laughing at him behind his back. There’s a fine line between sounding smart, and using “smart” words incorrectly, and sounding… less than smart.

Sam