verba volant

when i was little i used the dictionary all the time. it was very frustrating because the definition would always contains words i didn’t understand. i’d go and look those words up, but their definitions, too, would contain words i didn’t understand. i would look those up, only to be stuck in a hellish cycle of endless deferral. it was exhausting and i could never reconstruct what the original word meant. i don’t think i bothered asking my mom or grandmother. my grandmother was always home so i suppose it would have been easy to ask her, but for some reason i didn’t.

when i came to the US i didn’t buy an english-italian dictionary. by that time i had realized that dictionaries were useless. it was much easier to ignore the words i didn’t know and get the general meaning from the context.

now that my english is all right, when there is a word whose meaning i don’t know i ask simsby. if he’s not around i ask li’l pony. if neither is around i don’t ask anyone. i figure sooner or later i’ll figure it out.

there is a site that will send you an email with a new word every day. it’s called A.Word.A.Day. someone gift-subscribed me to it. i knew the first two words i received so i felt rather pleased with myself and even smug. since then i haven’t known one single word. until three days ago, i’d look at the word carefully, read the definition, and look at the usage. i’d tell myself that i’d try to find a way to use the word that very day. but the occasion never came up and by the following day i had forgotten the word entirely. three days ago i stopped opening the emails.

i do remember, however, snake eyes, because that seemed a really important word (well, two words). snake eyes is when you get two ones on a pair of dice. since this is the lowest possible outcome (i had to think a second on that, on account of not being very good at math, but of course it’s true), snake eyes also means bad luck. i hope i’m remembering this right. these words stuck with me because i like gambling, as a concept. for instance, i really, really like movies about gambling. i think i would like novels about gambling if i could understand them.

i never gamble in person unless my mom is in town. when my mom is in town we go to the casino on the miccosukee reservation and gamble away $10 each. we stay at the slots until we finish the $10. the last time we went it was touch and go for a bit because the casino had replaced the usual slots with new ones and for the life of us we couldn’t understand how the new ones worked. finally we asked a slot attendant and she told us. the explanation was very difficult and i didn’t understand it (my mother didn’t even bother following). the young attendant had to think a little to figure out what the easiest machine in the house was, then walked us to it and told us its very basics. she told us not to touch this or that button because it would make things too difficult for us. we managed to play for a long time with our $10. we felt cool and also a little smug, though there was no reason for the smugness whatsoever.