Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?

Because I Am Not

I am a reader for two reasons.

First, I read fiction because I want to be swept up in a story. It doesn’t matter what’s happening in my life as I know I’m just a page away from escape, from endless possibilities. Reading takes me places I’ll never go and introduces me to characters I’ll never meet. Reading is the wardrobe through which I find Narnia.

Now, I read nonfiction because I am a bit of a SmartyPants McKnowItAll and nothing delights me more than being able to throw around bits of information that I’ve gleaned. It doesn’t matter if I’m just parroting the data that someone else has already parsed; it matters that I’m able to pull it out of my long term memory and hurl it at someone else at the right time.

Knowledge is power, baby.

That’s why when I read nonfiction and it makes me feel dumb, it causes a great deal of cognitive dissonance.

As I’ve mentioned on the podcast, I’m currently reading Rick Wilson’s Everything Trump Touches Dies and it is a delightfully bitchy take from a conservative who is absolutely furious about All Things Trumpian. (As we’re a day past a second assassination attempt, there’s probably an argument to be made that nothing that touches Trump makes him die. Though I am not a fan, I truly do not want him to become a martyr and I’m glad everyone has terrible aim. But I’d be delighted if he chose to exit stage left.)

Anyway, the problem with this book is that it’s making me consider exactly how limited my vocabulary is. I read on my Kindle which has a dictionary feature. The deeper I get into this book, the more I’m convinced that I don’t know shit about shit about words. About 15% in, I began to not only look up the hard words, but also highlight them because there were so many new to me.

In the beginning, I though I could figure out some of them via context, but not nearly enough.

So, here are the words that may as well be Greek to me. I looked every one of them up and then promptly forgot what they meant, so here are my guesses:

Noumenon: This is what happens when you don’t hit it like, get it hot, make a bitch, and it’s a fem.

Gimcrack: I don’t have a definition for this one so much as I have an urge to sing, “Corn, and I don’t care!” each time I run across it. BTW, Wilson uses this one a lot. It probably has a really powerful meaning that has completely escaped me.

Ichor: I think his wings melted when he flew too close to the sun. Sad.

Internecine: The stage where your nectarine isn’t quite ripe. Sad.

Apostasies: I love those clear glass apostasies jars! So cute on the countertop holding brightly colored candies.