Words Words Words!

The other day while sitting for English home work with the children I thought of some English words that I had heard for the first time in my life and how I learned their meanings. How I never forgot the person who taught me that word or the occasion when I learned them. Here are some!

When I was 9, one night my sister was mugging up for her college social studies test. She had a habit of reading aloud and repeating the sentence over and over to memorize it. I kept hearing the word "Judiciary" again and again. She was pronouncing the word in such a way that it was beginning to sound very musical. I asked her the meaning. I remember she said something that I did not quite understand! But thats how I learned 'Judiciary' and whenever I read the word I think of her.

I had an uncle who used to visit us very often. He had some psychological issues and most times would start a fight with my father on some irrelevant topic. I remember one day, I must have been very young, when my father had a big fight with him and ordered him out of the house. After he left, my father said "...this is very recalcitrant behavior". My ears perked up. I ran to look at the word in the dictionary. It said "stubborn resistance". Thats how I got the word "Recalcitrant" into my vocabulary.

Once in school, we were all lined up in the large inside courtyard waiting for the morning assembly to begin. There must have been 200 kids from grades 1 through 10 standing in their respective rows all talking, fidgety and stamping their feet in impatience. Our school principal, Sister Teresa, one fine, immensely large English woman walked in and shouted into the microphone "All right! I want you to stop this cacophony right now". I scribbled the word down in my note book and later on found out its meaning. Thats how "Cacophony" stuck to me.

As we were getting into adolescence, one recess period we were discussing girly stuff. There was one girl in our class who was very precocious. That day she mouthed the word "Rape" for the first time. We were all ears and since I did not have a dictionary at hand, I told myself that I would look it up first thing when I got home. I went home and forgot about it. And when I did remember about the episode, I realized that I had forgotten the word in the first place!! I did not have my friends' phone number, so I spent the whole day wracking my brain. I was in the shower when the word came to my head with a bang! I was so worried that I should not forget it, that I wrote it down in water on the gray mosaic bathroom wall. It kept drying off and I kept tracing it again and again with watery fingers until I was done with my bathing!! At the end of it, I did remember the word and looked it up in the dictionary!

As a child I loved to make up my own songs and dance to their tunes before my grandfather. He loved us and loved to hear us sing. At the end of my dance/song episode he would clap with much excitement, laugh his toothless smile and say "Encore Encore". I learned that it stood for "asking for a repeat performance by an audience" and that made me happy.