The Epitome of Humility

            I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging, but I figure that I’m a pretty intelligent guy, especially when it comes to words.  Honestly, with my wife and I as English teachers, not too many people like to play board games that involve words with us.  Pity.  (Not-so-subtle hint: It’s been so long since we’ve really played that we’re a bit rusty.)

            My favorite book as a two-year-old was a picture dictionary (that I still have).  It’s falling apart, but it was loved to death.  I read voraciously as a child and I do now.  There was a little anomaly called junior high, where my reading habits slowed, but only in public.  My vocabulary can switch from academic to hick to junior high to jock to computer geek and back again with ease.

            But all this does not mean that I am perfect.  I am human and do make language mistakes, as this anecdote will testify.

            AP English. Senior year at Mascoutah Community High School.  Mr. Manwaring had been out for radiation treatments.  Ms. Stereotyped Spinster Librarian Lady was the long-term sub.  She hated me because I despised Emily Dickinson and ridiculed the characters of Ethan Frome. Oh, wait. That’s a different story.  I digress.

            Rewind (not delete) back to the setting: same year and place.  This story occurred around Halloween.  We had immersed ourselves in the occult-ness that is Edgar Allan Poe.  Having read many of his works before, I was a mini-expert among my peers for this unit.  I touched up my short story that I had written the year before, “The Ultimate Sin,” as part of a creative assignment where we were supposed to imitate Poe’s macabre style.  I received high praise from Mr. M: he came in one day, excited, and turned off the lights, and read it aloud by flashlight.  Definitely cool.  I became a writing celebrity (as far as that goes in high school).  And I’ll admit that it’s not the best story in the world, but I thought I was all that and two bags of chips and a Coke.

            And then one day, feeling high and mighty, and wanting to flaunt my literary wisdom and ostentatious vocabulary, I committed a gaffe that would take me down a couple of notches.

            Still discussing Poe, hubris in full effect, I volunteered my opinion that dismally tragic Edgar was the epitome of a writer who went crazy, threw what remained of his life away, indulged in substances, died, and became famous.  I did so and felt pretty smug.

            Later that period, I was reading from another text, and I came across the word epitome again.  However, up to that point in my life, I had never encountered the word in writing.  I knew what it meant in conversation.  Heck, I had just used the word myself.  As I read, I figured out what it meant by the context.  But when it came time to say it, I stumbled, and using my superior decoding unfamiliar word skills, I pronounced it ep-ih-toam—three syllables, first one stressed, last one with a long o.

            “What did you just say?” Mr. M. chuckled.

            The whole class, who hadn’t been paying close attention because they were reading ahead, like the good, little book nerds we were, stopped and looked up.

            Mr. M. started shaking his head and full-on belly laughed.  I was ridiculed for the rest of the semester.  My vanity damaged, I didn’t speak in class for many weeks.

            Bringing this tale full circle, let me rephrase my earlier analogy about dropping a few notches: after mispronouncing epitome, my lofty, prideful branches were hewn down and cast into the fire.  As my students today would say, I got burnt. Roasted.

            I now use this example of my linguistic faux pas with my students as an attempt to get my students to care about their overall vocabulary skills and how they present themselves when they speak.  Some of them are too proud to care about how moronic they sound, though, and refuse to abandon their purposeful mispronunciations and ignorance.