Words from My Father

    Every day I receive a new word, via email, from Word Daily. Yesterday's word was "obstreperous" (noisy and difficult to control). 

    Obstreperous. When I read this word, I heard it in my father's voice. "You're just obstreperous!" he would say to me, teasingly. I was too young to know what the word meant, but I could tell by his tone that he loved me. 

    He told his children they were "obstreperous," "perspicacious" and "impudent" before they understood "doggie" and "moo," but he spoke these words to us with such affection we glowed under the supposed compliment. He would say, "You're my p-i-double-l pal," and we thought it was grand to be Dad's pal. Only years later, after we learned to spell, did we get the joke.

    He could be serious about words, too. "Enunciate," he would say sternly. "Say 'get' not 'git.' Don't say, 'It's somethin' I'm plannin',' but 'It's something I'm planning.'" He and my mother were both from Kentucky, but he had no patience with poor enunciation. Surely because of that training, I was able to be a radio commentator for twenty years.

    My father had a repertoire of three or four memorized poems. When he was well into his nineties, my son called him on the phone one day and asked if he could still recite "The Raven," by Edgar Allen Poe.  Yes, he could, and he did, right there on the phone, and my son recorded that wavery old voice giving one final recitation of my dad's favorite poem.

    My father was famous for telling a story that centered around words. It started with an explanation that the Hottentot language built words by adding words together. "For instance," he would continue, "the Hottentot word for mother is 'muder.' The Hottentot word for children is 'trotter.' If they were stuttering children, the word was 'stridle-trotter.' So a mother of stuttering children was called a 'stridle-trotter-muder.'" And so on, until he got to the climax of the story with "the butel-rotten-lotten-gitter-wetter-cotter-Hotten-totten-stridle-trotter-muder-otten-tater has escaped." It means "the murderer of a Hottentot mother of stuttering children who was kept in a kangaroo cage with a slat cover to keep the rain off" has escaped.      It is a word dear to my heart.