Tuesday, December 12, 2006

oh, and!

i was just leaving a comment about how i'm stupid over at tart's, and in doing so, i remembered having a different stupid moment just this morning that i wanted to share with you all! season of giving, and all that. i generously give you my embarrassing inner monologues.

as background, every now and then i have these little linguistic epiphanies. when i have them, i often marvel at the fact that i can walk and chew gum at the same time, because only a monumentally idiotic person would not have figured these things out yet. for instance, i remember when it dawned on me that the letter "W" was shaped like a double "U." Double U = W. amazing! and the time when i realized that "cigarette" was "little cigar." oh, how i marveled at that one.

so today, i am walking toward the elevator on my way into work. i am thinking about nothing in particular and everything all at once. for some reason i am thinking about portrait of the artist as a young man (shut up), and the passage early in the book where stephen, as a child, is imagining his own funeral. part of what he thinks is "The bell! The bell! Farewell! O farewell!" and then i thought about the variation on "farewell," "fare thee well," and how it such an antiquated sounding term.

and then i was like, wait. "fare well." farewell. holy shit.

i tell you, sometimes i blow my sad, addled, pre-caffeinated mind.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

that was enjoyable. :)

DancingFish said...

Those little moments are priceless!I was in high school by the time I realized that it was the right-hand side of the road, not the right-as-in-correct side of the road that I was suppossed to be riding my bike on...

Anonymous said...

I came out of the dentist when I was 13 and saw a Plymouth car parked in front. But I read it as Ply Mouth so I was convinced that it was the official car of dentistry.

Anonymous said...

It took me amazing amounts of time to connect the word chaos with it's spelling. I knew both the spoken word and the written word, and I knew they both meant the same thing, but I still thought they were different words.

Incidentally, I spend way too much time trying to pronounce the security words. Today's is mauag.

Anonymous said...

OK, I'll fess up: Until about two years ago, I thought "segue" was was short for... um... segue.