Word jumble

Mine is a very argumentative household, I must confess. Our dinner table resounds with political, social and sporting discussions all the time. If someone is eavesdropping, within minutes they can latch onto the train of thought any one of us is pontificating about. The tone and the tenor, is loud enough. And so is the reasoning. Both biased for, or prejudiced against, the topic in question. 

But of late, we have switched to using words that require occasional and discrete peeps into the dictionary. For instance, if the belligerence becomes pugnacious, obstreperous or polemical, I have to first find out the meaning of the terminology, before describing it as thus.

What exactly do those strange sounding terms mean? If you flung this query at me suddenly, you would get a vacuous look in response. Or I might cook up a precipitous explanation that could lead to further ambiguity.

Till a few days back, even I did not know what all of this meant. It is not that I had not seen these words. Any voracious reader is bound to encounter them in some book or another. Authors, who write to impress, or write only for their own fraternity, use complicated words to express the simplest of things. Personally, I have never understood this complication of simplicity but here I digress. 

There is definitely additional descriptive power in certain words, even when they depict the same thing. I mean, calling your girlfriend your inamorata, is more delightful than calling her your future wife. But this sounds better in its written form only. Verbally, there might be further innovative ways to demonstrate affection, than using an endearment that gets lost in translation. 

Similarly, infuriated or piqued might describe anger more appropriately than say, displeased or offended. But what is wrong in just saying “I was angry”? Gets the message across instantaneously. Also, people generally leave you alone to cool down.

So, all this while, I had no problem in stating the obvious in its most understandable manner possible. If happy, and ecstatic, meant the same thing, I chose the former. When, saying sorry, or apologising, conveyed similar sentiments, I picked the first one, and so on and so forth. My listeners could comprehend what I meant to convey and I could communicate without misinterpretation. 

Our progeny meanwhile, decided to sit for a vocabulary examination. Suddenly, our mealtime discussions were inundated with all sorts of alien sounding words. What was occurring in neighbouring Syria, was not only pernicious, I was informed, but also calamitous and cataclysmic. I would have used the generic term, tragic, to describe the entire happening, but now I had to up the ante. 

When Chile lost to Brazil in the penalty shootout at the FIFA Word Cup quarter-finals, I said that I was sad for the losing team. When no one paid any attention to me, I announced that not only was I lachrymose but I was lugubrious, dolorous and elegiac, all at once. My proclamation was met with a pin-drop silence. 

“You have a headache dear?” spouse reacted first.

“No, I feel saturnine,” I explained. 

“Is that a good thing?” he tried to guess.

“Not as bad as woebegone,” I supplied a hint

“Mom is crestfallen, right?” our daughter piped up.

“You could say that,” I said.

“She does not look inconsolable,” my husband remarked.

“Or despondent or morose or tristful,” our daughter rattled off.

She should pass that exam, said the voice in my head!