Words to live by

Shortly before I sat down to write this, I found out that National Thesaurus Day took place earlier this week and I missed it yet again. Ironically I cannot find the words to properly describe my disappointment.

I’ve always been a word guy. Or, at least, always wanted to be a word guy. Not so much that I like to string words together and form them into cogent, audible sentences in front of people to hear. No, I’m just kind of amazed that out of all the millions and billions of things that exist in this universe, there’s a different word for just about every one of them.

I remember when I was a little kid out on the farm, a dictionary salesman knocked on our door one summer day. We used to have quite a few people stop by. There were the insurance salesmen, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Kirby vacuum sales people, etc. ... I think that it was one of these door-to-door people that we got our set of World Book Encyclopedias. And then there was the day that the dictionary dude showed up.

He came into our living room, sat down on our green vinyl couch and started into his sales pitch. As he talked, he proceeded to open up this big, funky-looking, brown, satchel-like briefcase. From within its beat-up lining, he pulled out two large books. One was brown in color while the other was bright red. They were dictionaries. I can’t remember which company published them.

He went on to tell us that the brown dictionary was for adults while the red one was created more for young people like myself at the time. I remember that he didn’t use the words brown and red. He instead called them “chocolate” and “strawberry,” I believe in an effort to try to appeal to our possible adoration for ice cream. Personally, it didn’t work on me. I detest Neapolitan ice cream. But it must have worked on somebody because he ended up with a check and we ended up with both of those books. They sat up on the shelves by the encyclopedias.

Now, I don’t want people to think that I was a nerd, but I was kind of a nerd. I spent many hours of my childhood engrossed by the volumes on that bookshelf. I used to grab the encyclopedias and the dictionaries, plop down on that green couch and page through them for hours on end. By osmosis alone, I’d probably be a much smarter person today if I hadn’t had the exploits of Gilligan and Colonel Hogan playing out on the old RCA black and white television in the background.

I didn’t mess too much with that strawberry dictionary — it was for little kids. No, I liked to act like an adult and spent my time with the chocolate book. I’d open it up to any page and start checking out words. I found words that I thought sounded cool. Like the word perpendicular. I always liked perpendicular. I think that it’s because it sounds kind of dirty but really isn’t. Same with spelunking.

And then one day, my brother left a thesaurus laying around. Now I not only had access to all of these different words that meant different things, now I could find a bunch of different words that meant the same thing. As I recall, I believe that the thesaurus was butter-pecan in color.

That thesaurus changed my life. The front yard was no longer full of dandelions. It was now resplendent in a hue of golden pigmentation. I was no longer late getting home at night. Now I was somewhat delinquent with my parentally-imposed curfew. Instead of burping in church I now had inadvertent, accidental spasmodic stomach expulsions while perched upon the wooden pew. Nobody knew what the heck I was talking about and that’s the way I liked it.

Nowadays, I’m still interested in words. I do a lot of crossword puzzles and I play several people in games of Words With Friends on my phone. Evidently, there are many people out there that are much more into words than myself because I get my gluteus maximus handed to me on a semi-regular basis.

I just hope that I don’t miss National Thesaurus Day next year. Maybe I’ll have a big party to celebrate it. Or, as we thesaurians like to say, perhaps I will host a monumental soiree to in order to extol the virtues of this glorious day.

Unless of course, I’m out spelunking ... hee, hee ... I knew I couldn’t write it with a straight face.

You can contact Wallace at gregwallaceink7@gmail.com. You can follow him on his blog at http://gregwallaceink.blogspot.com.