Tryst with words

When boyzone sang “It’s only words and words are all I have to take your heart away”, I thought I should believe them but what words actually did was to blow off my head. The problem began as early as my sixth grade when the teacher asked us to make a sentence on ‘moment’ and what I answered was “The moment of locomotives through the jungle was worth watching” and some shithead came up with, “Locomotives can have movement not moment”, I was screwed to say the least.

I could never get the twist between an egoist and an egotist and could never even make out if I had to get my teeth treated by an orthodentist or an orthodontist, lost a tooth in the process though. Once my English teacher, the whimsical creep he was, in a moment of outrage, asked me to “Abandon to abaddon.” I stood stunned, not knowing the meaning and without the courage to ask and when his temper softened his answer was “Go to Hell”. Why the hell would you say it like that!

As my quest for words began, I had to be taken ‘aback’ and not by surprise, I had to ‘loathe’ and not hate someone, I had to feel the ‘bereavement’ of someone’s loss and not simply grief and there had to be a ‘lukewarm’ response to my blog rather than just being cold. It was not that I had begun loving words, just learnt not to hate them. The only word that I liked though was ‘hippopotomonstrosequippedaliophobia’ – the fear of long words. I still can’t pronounce it and the reason that I love it is because no one can and I know for a fact that while reading this you twisted your tongue twice for the same. :-P

As my interest in language grew I had to deal with new things, idioms being the first. It must have been an idiot who started the idioms, the first four letters being the same; it can’t be the part of Darwin’s evolution package. I hate idioms simply because it increases the chances of making double-meaning sentences. Once one of my friends came running to me, “Nishant has fallen off the wagon again; he is completely incoherent today” and I ran to see if he had some serious injuries and it was only after I had all the ‘f*@#s’ and ‘s*@#s ‘from him that I realised what it actually meant, “Nishant returned to drinking and was drunk again.”

Diving ‘head over heels’ into the idioms I found that ‘my heart skipped a beat’ every time I heard a new one. I know that I am only ‘knee-high on grasshopper’ in this field but I am not all ‘bumps and bruises’ and ‘I’ll stand up and be counted’. This is how you make a mess of something as simple as, “I am not well acquainted with idioms but I am trying.”

Last night my so called ‘gf’ called me, “I am flummoxed by your behaviour. I despise you for the way you act. You think that you are the plenipotentiary of my universe. You try to eschew my friends” and I was like, “Ek-ek kar k meri maa....achha cool down, take a deep breath” and while she took the breath I searched for my dictionary. It hurts when your girlfriend knows more than you, it actually does, male ego you know. I said, “This is me jaa....” and here she began, “It should be ‘it is me’, ‘this is me’ is not the English of the learned.” I tried to argue, “Winston Churchill too started with ‘This is me’ in his famous World War II speech” and holyshit I argued with a girl! Next half an hour I had to listen to everything from the evolution of English to the influence of Latin to urban usage.

This actually is, what you call, the side effect of love, an assignment of 200 words.

P.S – Please don’t ask questions on the ‘girlfriend’ part assuming that I have one. You’d be touching a tender spot.

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