Winter is stubborn. Once it has a hold, it keeps on holding. Today is partly cloudy and 30°. The high, now wait for it, will be 31°, cold, not chilly, but downright cold. I am still hibernating, trying to get rid of this malady. I missed a concert yesterday and might miss another tomorrow. I hope to be in fine fettle for Sunday’s concert.
I am at my animals’ beck and call. I can even interpret Henry’s barks unless he uses compound sentences. Both dogs have resorted to crying if I ignore them for even the shortest time, but that’s not what has me thinking. It’s beck and call. I wonder how I learned beck and call. Perhaps my mother was complaining just as I am but about us, the kids. I haven’t heard anyone use beck and call for a long time. I’ve heard beckon as in,”Winding roads that seem to beckon you,” from Old Cape Cod but only because we uke it. Words die out, disappear. Some deserve to die. Others will be missed, by a few of us at least. Doff is gone. Erewhile is too great to lose. I’ll just make an effort to save a few.
I taught my students bamboozle. They loved the word and used it in other classes. It wasn’t the definition they liked but the sound of the word. They pronounced it like balm-boozle, in their Ghanaian English accent. Their history teacher stopped and asked me about bamboozle as the word had appeared in several answers on the exam, and he didn’t know the word. I explained. He was impressed with them.
When I was a kid, the nun taught us how to look up a word in the dictionary. She explained how the words were organized by letter. I remember doing a practice sheet of finding the right pages for specific words. I got a dictionary that Christmas. It was on my list. I remember it was heavy and had a red cover. I still have a heavy dictionary with a red cover, not the same one, a later one. I used to keep it by my bed so I could look up words I didn’t know. Now it is stored in the bookcase of obsolete but still valuable books.
