Well, I found that every time I slipped a vocab word into a conversation with Mom, she usually commented on how I was being overly dramatic again, which made me want to string together entire sentences of vocabulary words every single time I spoke to her. (Who knows? Maybe you still do that just to bug her.)

I’d say things like, “Due to Mrs. Brackman’s propensity to relentlessly delve into the variety of ways words can be utilized, I have spent the school day being irked immensely and am therefore utterly exasperated and incapable of cleaning my room.”

Man, did Mom ever hate when I said things like that!

It never got me out of any work around the house or impress upon Mom the agony of the personal academic plight I faced daily at school, but all that extra vocabulary practice made me a vocab expert. So, I only missed two words all year.

(I try not to use vocab words when I talk to classmates and friends, because even though everyone knows adults might be impressed with big, long, stuffy words, kids are definitely not.)

Anyway, the day after our final vocabulary quiz, Mrs. Brackman made a colossal deal out of my overall vocabulary score, which was extraordinarily better than anyone else’s. She said she wished there was a special award she could give me for having the top vocabulary score, but then she said my reward was how well prepared I would be in life to, you guessed it, “communicate and define myself with words.” And that after all, was much more valuable than any award she could give.

Doesn’t that sound amazing?

You and I both know that the answer to that question is a monumental “NO!” There’s nothing amazing about not being good at any of the things that really count and being exceptionally good at something that no one except a vocabulary virtuoso like Mrs. Brackman is ever going to notice.

So, you might kind of cringe when I remind you that I created in my mind the Sixth-Grade Vocabulary Victor Award. I wrote about it in my journal, but then, when I reread the journal entry a week later, I realized how much of an SAP-o-saurus I was for making up an award for myself, and I ended up feeling worse than pathetic.

Love,

Me

P.S. Just so you know, SAP-o-saurus is an example of what Mrs. Brackman would call a “horrific slang term,” which makes it nearly impossible, according to Mrs. Brackman, for people to communicate with one another with any degree of accuracy. But I think, when used correctly, as I have done here, that “SAP-o-saurus” allows me to communicate something for which there is no other word.

Dear Me,

One thing I was actually looking forward to about going to Florida was lying at the condo pool chilling out.

That’s what summer’s for, right?

But my very first visit to the pool proved to be more than a little disturbing.