<editorsnote> Nerds, meet my buddy Jessica. She and I met through this loverly site, and by her reaching out to me asking if she could write for us. Really rad chickie, she provided a lot of insight into my childhood for me (something you don't get every day from someone!!) - andddddd she has quite the life story. Like did you know she moved cross country for love? ORRRR that she found out her ex cheated on her by reading it on Facebook? ANNNNDDDD she even married a guy she met off of Plenty of Fish! Yep, true story! This is life as told through her eyes, and through the keyword of the nerd. HIT IT JESSICA!!! </editorsnote>
#TalkNerdyToMeLover's @ItsJessWeaver
I can't tell if I'm a word nerd or a word geek, but there is clearly something up with me and words. It's spoken word more than anything, really, though I often judge a sentence's worth by how well it reads aloud.
Before I tell you this story I have to tell you about my husband. He and I are like Oreos and milk; you could have one without the other, but they're so much better together. When I met Tim in August 2010, I’d been single for almost a year after breaking up with one of the most horrible men on the planet. He reminded me who I was after a long abusive relationship had all but erased my personality. He was the first person in a long time to call me a nerd to my face, and I wasn’t sure I believed him. But, he was right. He is a geek who has a thing for anime, plays MMOs, and loves Big Bang Theory...though describing him would take more than one article. He's pretty smart. He talks with me about philosophy and religion and doesn’t sound like a moron. He’s writing a book, something I’ve always wanted to do, but can’t get past the details to get started. He is not the same crazy I am about words, however. Let's just say: he's the storyteller and I'm the editor. He makes up words on the spot, and he is not a perfect speller...he plays with words while I order them around. I want a word to be perfectly used in a sentence, to be perfectly said, and perfectly spelled. He often says, "Well, you know what I meant," when the words don't come out quite right. Almost 100% of the time, he's right. Long story short, communicating is about meaning, not about using just the right word in just the right way.
But then, there is the voice in my head, or maybe just a sick feeling whenever I hear a word used or said in a way that it most certainly should not be, that tells me it isn’t just about meaning. You have to say it right! (Maybe this stems from the time I used the word “foreplay” in a sentence at the table with my grandparents. I meant “impatient and potentially unnecessary anticipation” but all they heard was “foreplay” out of my twelve-year-old mouth. Whatever.) And if you learn a new word, or the right way to use a word you already thought you knew, you should self-correct to use it right. You shouldn’t ever, EVER keep saying it badly even after I’ve corrected you. Even if you think it is funny. I’m saying this because I want you to understand. I’m trying to make sure you don’t think I’m an asshole after I tell you what caused me to leave my marriage bed to go sleep alone in the office/guest room the other night. See, what had happened was:
My husband was reading a joke aloud to me from a joke app on his smartphone. He likes to read jokes to me in bed. He’ll read MAXIM jokes to me and ruin it for me when I go to read the issue later. I don’t really mind. He makes me laugh, and that is important. Some joke he read had a reference to Cambridge University…you know, the college in England. Well, when he read the joke, he said “CAM-bridge.” Like camisole, camouflage, camry, camshaft… not like Cambridge, as in came-bridge (keɪmbrɪdʒ--that’s the real phonetic spelling, and perhaps those of you still reading are just the type of people who know what that means.) So, very politely (but honestly, a little bit incredulous-I mean, who doesn’t know how to pronounce Cambridge? There are at least 9 US States with a city or town called by that name. Just saying.) I told him he was saying it wrong. And I told him how to say it. I guess I might have implied he was an idiot. He kept saying it the wrong way, over and over. He also defended his version of the word, citing several other words with the same letter groupings and the exact pronunciation he had chosen. By this time I could tell he was teasing me for going so apeshit over a dumb word, for pete’s sake, and I couldn’t handle it. I told him if he kept saying it the wrong way I would be forced to leave the room. And he opened his mouth and said,
“Cam-bridge.”
So I left. I walked into the other room and plopped onto the bed, having decided to google the shit out of the word Cambridge to see how I could prove to him that the way I said it was right. Not only right, but OBVIOUS. PLAIN. COMPLETELY, 100% everyone-knows-this, it-makes-sense, obvious shit.
Know what I found? I was wrong. No, I was right about the pronunciation. I was wrong to say it made sense. In fact, it doesn’t make sense. No one knows why it’s pronounced that way, because pretty much every other word with CAM in the front of it is pronounced with a short A. Using the rules of the English language as a guide, my husband was saying the word the way it ought to be pronounced. SIGH. Even the river that runs under the bridge in that famous UK city is called CAM.
I laid there for a while. I mean, what was I gonna do? I’d taken a stand, I’d been kind of an ass. Granted, hearing him say it was like hearing nails on a chalkboard, but he was just being silly--making fun of me for being a language Nazi. He came to find me, because that’s the kind of person he is, and made me come back to bed. I tried to explain, but I sounded kind of lame even to my own ears.
So, in the end, I couldn’t really explain it. He said he was sorry, that he wasn’t trying to be mean, and then we got naked and forgot about Cambridge. Because sometimes that’s the only way to handle it when you’ve been a pompous jerk to your spouse.
What did I learn? Besides the fact that I like make-up sex? Well, I’m trying to be a lot more forgiving about my words. But goddammit, if I hear one more American English-speaking person butcher the French words “beaucoup” or “Aeropostale” I might have an apoplectic fit.
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Tuesday, December 13, 2011 at 12:20PM
