Truffle Redux: Words and Mistaken Meanings
I love words. Love them. In fact, although I try to cultivate a zen acceptance of my own mortality, my most vivid terror about aging is the idea of forgetting words — I feel a choking horror at the thought that I might reach for a word and… not find anything.
Part of this terror stems from my tendency to use words based on an instinctual, rather than a conscious, understanding of their meaning. Let me illustrate: last week I used the word “redux” in a conversation with Maureen in a context that didn’t make sense to her. When she asked me to clarify the word, my vocabulary alarm went off: Maureen knows words, so why didn’t she know this one?
For the longest time I’ve used “redux” to mean “a brief summary.” You know, you’re “reducing” a topic to its essentials. It made sense to me.
So last week, I pulled up one of my favorite websites and put in “redux.” Here’s what I got:
re·dux
–adjective
brought back; resurgent: the Victorian era redux.
[Origin: 1650–60; < L: returning (as from war or exile), n. deriv. (with pass. sense) of redūcere to bring back; see reduce]
Well, I got the “reduce” part right.
This reminded me of some of my notable word confusions over the years. The first one I remember was my precocious insistence to my father and one of our church elders that “destruct” could be used as a verb, as in “she destructed her credibility.” I was about seven at the time and it was entirely in character for me to be arguing with two grown men about word definitions and proper grammatical usage. I was wrong, of course, but it took a dictionary — that holy repository of word knowledge — to convince me.
I also remember coming across the word “truffle” in multiple contexts. I was very confused about this word as a child but eventually settled on what seemed to satisfy all the requirements placed on this small word: a truffle was a kind of chocolate that one dug up in the forest. I managed — barely — to keep “trifle” separate in my mind, although I suspected trifles might somehow involve soily chocolate.
Karina said,
May 29, 2007 @ 12:01 pm
Part of this terror stems from my tendency to use words based on an instinctual, rather than a conscious, understanding of their meaning.
Oh, yes! Me too! In my case, I think it comes from a long history of learning words by intuiting meaning based on context rather than bothering to look them up.
beth said,
May 29, 2007 @ 10:52 pm
Exactly!
Also, I read something today after I posted this, about fannish people having a social acceptance of mispronouncing words because they’ve only read them. I related to that very much!
Maureen McQ said,
May 31, 2007 @ 5:40 pm
You realize that your use of ‘redux’ could be quite standard, particularly in business, and I could just have been, you know, clueless?
Not only do I sometimes think I know what a word means and turn out to be six degrees off, but I still, after all these years, pronounce words weirdly because I’ve read them and never heard them pronounced.
Christopher Barzak said,
June 4, 2007 @ 11:02 am
Oh, I do this too. I think most people do, actually. And if they say they don’t, I assume they’re lying. Whenever I discover that I’ve been using a word wrongly (it happens a lot actually) or that I’ve been pronouncing one wrongly (it happened a lot, but luckily not as often as it once was in the past) I just sort of go, hmm, well at least that’s one I’m not going to flub up around others any longer. But because of that, like Maureen, I tend to think, when I hear someone else use a word in a way I’m thinking isn’t right, at least not in my experience of it, I say something, mostly to find out for myself, because I’m often thinking it’s a good way to correct any future mishaps with the word myself.