Mary Jo Bellner Swartzberg
A few weeks back, I had to take my car into the dealership to have a cracked windshield repaired after a six-month circuitous journey of maneuvering through repairs and insurance issues. The wait time for the installation would be about four hours.
Sitting in the spacious waiting area, I struck up a conversation with a woman who owns a nursery in Green Valley. Of course, she seemed knowledgeable about all things relating to plants, so I asked her questions, such as eating organic versus non-organic fruits and vegetables, and why won’t my basil plant regrow after I trimmed off all of its leaves? She had much to share regarding organic versus non-organic foods, but then she said to me, “The reason your basil plant is not regrowing is due to photosynthesis. With no leaves, the sun cannot nourish the plant so that it will grow more.” Photosynthesis? Then it dawned on me. Of course! I remembered that word from my high school biology class! Photosynthesis: the process by which green plants and some other organisms use sunlight to synthesize foods from carbon dioxide and water.
Then I thought of another word that I learned in a high school English literature class: onomatopoeia: a type of word, or the process of creating a word, that phonetically imitates, resembles, or suggests the sound that it describes. Think animal noises such as oink or meow. This word stuck with me, because one of my classmates, Fred, made a joke about it. The teacher was not amused, but we students howled at the cleverness of the joke.
This prompted an idea of asking family and friends for their interesting word memories from high school.
RP: I remember a sophomore high school English teacher who demanded for us to learn the differences between there, their, and they’re. We couldn’t pass her class unless we demonstrated that understanding. To this day, I am grateful to her.
PR: A Rat In The House Might Eat The Ice Cream: ARITHMETIC.
SS: I always wrote “noone” until my beloved high school English teacher Mrs. Bates said, “Susie, how did you get this far without knowing it was no one?!”
JS: I recall learning the word disestablishmentarianism, as in “Mortals who abide in vitreous edifices should not possess morbid propensity toward disestablishmentarianism.” Although I do not recall the source of this quote!
JS: A word that I recall is formaldehyde from my sophomore biology class when we had to dissect a frog taken out of a jar of formaldehyde.
RS: I learned the word parsimonious from a friend who said to me, when referring to someone else, “I didn’t want to call the person stingy!”
DP: I have a virtual plethora of words that I learned in high school!
“Few activities are as delightful as learning new vocabulary” —Thom Gunn, English poet