My middle school English teacher (who also wasn't a teacher of any kind)
used to make us do book reports. No problem there. We had to start out
saying what kind of book it was -- novel, history, etc. One of the books
I read was called "Words of the Myths", which is a book about words that
derive from Greek and Roman myths. I asked my mom what kind of book it
was and she suggested "philology". I looked the word up and agreed.

I hand in my paper, and it's returned with philology marked as misspelled.
I marched over to the teacher and complained that I knew the word was
*not* misspelled, as I had copied the spelling directly from the dictionary
when I looked it up. The teacher shrugged and said "Oh, I didn't know what
it meant so I marked it misspelled."

When I was about 10 I had a rather naive, not very bright, and very
Christian teacher called Miss Jones (probably the first person I met
who had a Welsh accent to match the name). For whatever reason, she
brought in a record of Tom Lehrer songs. And played the whole thing.
Including "The Masochism Tango".

- Miss Jones, what's "masochism"?

- I'm not sure, let's look it up in the dictionary, shall we?...
[flip flip flip] "A sexual perversion characterized by..."
ooh, I didn't think it was *that* strong!


The one good thing to come from the incident is that I will never
forget the meaning or spelling of philology. *evil grin*

The one I remember was "phthisis" A bit after the above episode we
had a sort of competitive test to see how good our pronunuciation was.
We had to read out a list of words of ever-increasing difficulty and
obscurity. I was way ahead of the rest of the class, and made it all
through the list until that one, which was the very last item. The
frustrating thing was that I knew *how* to pronounce it, and what the
word meant; I just couldn't physically do it, thanks to having a cleft
palate and at that point no denture to articulate that consonant
cluster on. (I've since acquired a fascination for languages like
Georgian that have gigantic pile-ups of consonants - I can roll off
placenames like "Mtskheta" with no problem at all).

============== j-c ====== @ ====== purr . demon . co . uk ==============
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