Misused words

I think every kid has moments where they learn new words and want to put these new words into use, but they don't get the nuances of the word quite right. So, I'm going to remember some of the times I got words wrong. Undoubtedly, there were more times than are included here.

Once when I was in kindergarten, I was at my friend David Christensen's house. We were getting out of his van and he was talking to me, but for some reason I wasn't responding. His mom said to me, "Don't ignore him." Well, I had heard the word annoy, and here I heard ignore, so I might have thought that I had simply misheard annoy and it was actually ignore. Not long after that, my brother David was teasing me, as he usually did, and I said, "Quit ignoring me!" To which, of course, he said, "I'm not ignoring you!"

Another time, probably in first grade, I was on the playground, hanging on a bar. Another kid was also hanging and we were approaching each other. I said, "Caution," and he said, "My name's not Austin!"

One night at dinner, my dad asked me if I wanted more soup, and I said, "In fact I do!" That's not entirely misusing that expression, but it made David laugh.

For a time, I confused the words deaf and death. After I broke my arm, it was a rule that there were no more than two people on the trampoline at a time. One time, I remember reading the warning label on the tramp out loud as explanation to a younger cousin why he couldn't be on the tramp. (My gut tells me it was Peter, but he might have been too young.) In addition to things like "broken bones," the last item was "death." Jesse said, "That means you die." I said, "No, it means you can't hear." We had a little argument about what death meant.

On another occasion, when I was six or seven, we were at my paternal grandparents' house. My cousin Krishelle wanted us to draw pictures to give to Grandma Judy. She was drawing a picture of some fruit (one of her older siblings, I think Lacey, said that the bottom of her apple looked like the bottom of a 2-liter bottle). I was using my imagination and drawing some picture with a backstory to it. I was drawing a girl protagonist in her garden, and I also drew the dreary garden of a wicked person and labeled it "Garden of Death." I don't think I fully understood the negative connotations of the word. Well, we gave the pictures to Grandma Judy, and after that, my mom and my cousin Kadee asked me why I drew a garden of death. I began crying, because I hadn't meant anything bad by drawing it, but it seemed I was in trouble.

When I was seven, my dad said something was "gruesome." I asked him what gruesome meant, and he said, "It kind of means, just awful." Well, I don't think that's a very satisfactory definition. Then on Labor Day weekend in 1996, we were camping in Fillmore Canyon, and I was walking in the creek, and I slipped somewhere and landed on my shin, bruising it. It was very painful, and I think I had a bit of an overreaction to it, and I began hating the creek. (I created a jingle, "Chalk Creek, you're a geek," because geek was the only word I could think of that rhymed with creek.) I told my cousin Terrill that the creek was gruesome, remembering my dad's definition: "awful." However, it seems that I understood it better less than two months later. In my second grade class, for Halloween, we created paper candy corns, and we had to put a Halloween word on it, going down, and then each letter in that word would begin another word. My Halloween word was "Gruesome." I think I used ghost for g and I used eerie for one of the e's.