My daughter has a yearly word. While some people make New Year’s resolutions, my daughter decides which word she will overuse and work into every conversation for the next twelve months. I’m not sure how long this has been going on, although from the amount of words the rest of my family is able to remember, I’d say it’s been five or six years.
This behavior began, I suppose, when my daughter Maddie discovered that the rest of us were using words or phrases that she was unfamiliar with. ‘Beggars can’t be choosers,’ ‘eating crow,’ and ‘preaching to the choir’ gave her pause. The real fun began when she (as the youngest member of the family) decided to insert these phrases into her own conversation – usually in the wrong context.
Touché.
See what I mean?
Other times Maddie reminded me of Ziva David; one of the characters on the hit television show NCIS. Ziva is highly skilled investigator but suffers a grammatical disconnect in her vocabulary because her foreign culture puts her at a disadvantage with American colloquialisms. Thus, well-known quips become fodder for a good chuckle when Ziva says (for example): “If you want to make an omelet you’ve got to break a few legs.”
One of the first words I noticed Maddie overusing was the word quote. I don’t mean that she listened so closely to people during the day that she was able to quote them at night. I mean that she would say something like, “My teacher said that reading this book would be a, quote, life- changing experience.” We couldn’t get through breakfast or dinner without that word coming up in conversation. She soon segued into using the popular/annoying air quotes for emphasis.
Quite unexpectedly quote was packed away like last year’s Christmas decorations and apparently came for a visit.
“Apparently the principal thinks we need a pep talk over the school loud speaker every morning.” That peaked my interest. I looked at my son. He shrugged.
“The guys at my lunch table call them Fireside Chats. I think they’re meant to be inspirational.”
I smiled. “Maybe your principal has seen Eve Arden as Principal McGee in the movie Grease one too many times.”
“Apparently.”
Like any teenager, Maddie tosses around the latest trendy words and phrases, but in addition to sweet, beast, and my bad, Maddie always maintains one word that is expressly her own.
“Question,” she said one morning in January. I didn’t even tumble until I began to hear things like ‘questionable,’ ‘begs the question,’ ‘now there’s a question.’ Heaven help us, she had begun to conjugate her yearly words.
Maddie’s words have been no small source of entertainment for the rest of the family. We have all jumped on the bandwagon to try to use some form of Maddie’s yearly word just to tease her. Once we tried to use all of her past yearly words in the same conversation. It was enough to make an editor weep.
In her freshman year of high school Maddie began learning French. She also saw the movie Dead Poets Society. I suppose I should have warned my husband that a new phrase was on the horizon but it was so much more fun to see his face when he called to her to come downstairs.
“Oh captain, my captain?” she called back. My husband blinked and turned to look at me. That form of address didn’t last long before my husband put the kibosh on it. Undaunted, Maddie (quote) complied by morphing the address into French: “Oui, mon capitaine?” Somehow the French accent and dragging the last word out into three syllables was more palatable – not to mention hysterical – to my husband. She also added a response for her brother: “Oui mon frère?” He didn’t find that quite so funny as he did annoying – which was also a past yearly word.
Just before New Year’s Eve our family talked about a new yearly word for Maddie. After a pseudo rendition of an urban Who’s On First shtick using all of her past yearly words, we gave her suggestions for the upcoming year.
“Of course you don’t necessarily need a new word for every year,” my son said. “You can just be, quote, normal like the rest of us.”
“I know it’s not necessary…,” she began. Then she paused and smiled.
