Adventures in Vocabulary!

Watching TV with the kids, and one character is the Dowager Empress.

Me: She's "dowager" because she's the widow of the previous Emperor.
Eva: Everybody knows that, Connie.
Me: ...no, I'm pretty sure they don't, in fact, know that. I'm not even sure where you learned it, or how, or why.
Eva: Yeah, you could be right. You know, I'm starting to think my friends have a really poor vocabulary. There's a whole lot of words I use that they don't seem to know.
Me: Feel my pain.

But seriously, one of the problems of knowing a lot of words is that you never know what words other people don't know. (Except inchoate. Fuck that word. I'm sure it just appeared out of nowhere one day and suddenly it was everywhere, like some weird practical joke on me.)

Accurate synopsis, I suppose....

"This book was interesting. I first thought it would be about this boy Bud's story. But it turned into a story about the Depression and how hard it was on the Black people."

And the weird statement of the day, from a different review of the same book...

"I also didn't like how Bud kept talking about his mom. I know she died, but most people would prefer not to talk about their loss."

What the hell? Where did you learn to human, and can you get a refund on the course?

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