You meet words like you meet people. Away from home, all of a sudden, sometimes accidently. Some words enter your life when you make effort – like you trying to make effort to make new friends at a new place. Some words meet you around the corners of streets, purchasing vegetables from the same vendors which you visit on weekends.
We all have our prized stories of learning certain words. Some are funny, some are painful, some are even embarrassing. But all those stories, all those funny, painful, embarrassing occurrences, earn you words as if they were friends. You treasure those words, use them with fondness, and they become your best weapons. Words – those little building blocks of language – language that is common to us, but at the same time everyone’s unique tool chest.
Here I share six words that I cherish the most among my treasury, and how they introduced themselves to me.
1. Diligence.
I first met the word “Diligence” at Punjabi University, Patiala in the summer of 2019. I was visiting the campus with someone, and we happenned to stop by a professor who knew the person I was accompanying. We sat in her office for half an hour. I was introduced to the professor as a boy who had completed a work assigned to me well in time. Her remark was a two-word sentence, but full of conviction, “Hmm, diligence!” I befriended the word there and then. It has travelled with me all these years, and if someone asks today one virtue a student must possess, I will jump up, “Hmm, diligence!”
2. Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis
Nicknamed as P-45, I met this word at school. Schoolboys usually boast of such unique knowledge, which is otherwise not too useful in the everyday course of life, be it the longest word in the English language, or the name of the oldest religion. At one time, you were a highly respected guy in the class if you could pronounce the full word, or spell it correctly. A biology teacher once gave us an assignment of presenting a PowerPoint presentation on any virus in the world. The only rule was the time limit of 10 minutes. A friend actually took the pain to research P-45, and made a ppt with the first slide containing a string of 45 letters:
PNEUMONOULTRAMICROSCOPICSILICOVOLCANOCONIOSIS
He ended up convincing us that it was actually not such a rare disease, and there were really more cases of P-45 in the world than the number of letters it had.
3. Enthusiasm.
To be honest, my first greeting to enthusiasm wasn’t too enthusiastic. At HVM Convent School, there used to be a ten-minute free period after the school ended, in which all classes were dispersed one by one. This was a highly precious time – you could get up from your seat and walk to anyone’s place and talk to anyone – all this while the teacher was still in the class. There were debates, there was shouting, and there was clamour. On occasions, teachers posted on duty in corridors, came to class to gossip with class the in-charges.
One such day, some friends and I played a game, sort of, in which we had to ask each other tricky questions. At such an age, our vocabularies were quite insufficient, so asking the meaning of a new word was a valid riddle. One friend asked the meaning of “enthusiastically”. Replying to faces who had no clue, he explained it as a mixture of “joy” and “excitement” and “interest”. I didn’t like the word, of course, because it was long – it looked so sophisticated, and had a strange, cold aura about it. But it didn’t take long to get familiar with it. It took time to build enthusiasm for enthusiasm, but there are friends who become friends because you see them too much, that you can't restrain befriending them.
4. Intuition.
I was always confused about intuition because of the “tuition” in it. I continued to associate it with schooling and education for a long time.
Once upon a time, I was preparing a presentation on “Moral Values”. I bumped into this word yet again while surfing, and finally decided to look it up in the dictionary (sometimes you are so scared of or annoyed by a word that you don’t want to look it up in a dictionary!). A bit of exploration and I reached some website which described intuition as something like this:
“You have a hidden, wiser voice inside you. Sometimes it is muffled, yes, but it’s always there. Sometimes an answer comes to you from this voice – and you are surprised by how it came. That part, that familiar voice – that is intuition.”
Suddenly, I had an intuitive understanding of intuition and added it to my vocabulary. Now I happen to use it a lot.
5. Opportunity Cost.
The fifth one is a term, not a word per se. As a student of Economics throughout my high school, I have been bumping into this word quite often. But it was like that boy in your school you see quite often, also know his name, but do not understand that much. He’s quite nice, but you’re just afraid to talk to him, or be near him, as there’s some mystery about him. All seem to be rubbing well with it, except you. I always knew opportunity cost as “Value of the next best alternative foregone”, and my teacher always explained it with this example:
“A farmer chooses to plant wheat; the opportunity cost is rice plantation that he could have done with the same money.”
I couldn’t, despite explanation, figure out for a long time that if the farmer already has chosen the “most profitable” wheat to be grown, how does a calculation of the “next best alternative” come to serve any value?
And then I accidentaly - thankfully - struck into a Seth Godin blogpost with the same title. When you are sitting and spending your time on YouTube, it comes with an opportunity cost – you could have been working on some pending project. This suddenly called to mind the understanding that the “next best alternative” might actually be better than the task we are choosing to do. Maybe wheat is not still the best option, and by growing wheat what “best” thing you are crossing out – be it one rung higher or lower in value – is the opportunity cost. That little piece of knowledge, which cleared the understanding between the word and me, closed the deal. As expected, I was wreathed in smiles. Thanks, Seth Godin :)
6. Eg and ie.
Two expressions, but let’s keep them under one head. I handshaked with these much before my peers did. GK books were a part of the curriculum since junior classes, but mostly no one took them too seriously (in many cases, not even the GK teachers!). That was mostly because these books just talked about raw facts – say, ten tallest mountains in the world with their heights, ten famous sports players in the words - without any context. No doubt, despite this, they were interesting to read, but not so riveting that you sat to memorise the details.
One such book contained a chapter on abbreviations. Eg and ie sat there like two little cute twins. They sat innocently among those pages, unaware of the atrocities in the world, oblivious to the the wonders of science and technology, and looked at me with glossy eyes. I first read their Latin full forms – exampli gratia and id est. I showed it to my benchmates, but they found this tasteless. But the abbreviations stayed at the back of my mind. I had a fun time quizzing my classmates in all schools I went to (I got to study in 3 different schools in 5 years, and 5 in 12) about the full forms of these two. Eg, when I asked a group of boys about this, they were surprised that these carried actual full forms, and when I told them, they were all inops facies – clueless faces, i.e.
