In Plain Engel-ish

Being comfortable with multi-syllable English words comes with the territory for me. My birth “territory” being Indianapolis, I was born in a city that has at least as many syllables as any other American city. I was tempted to write “more syllables than any other,” but I suspect there might be a smarty-pants Floridian reading this who would prove me wrong before I could say “Apalachicola.” In any case, I have always been partial to long, difficult-to-pronounce words, so I was especially alert in my seventh-grade English class when Mr. Weeks, my all-time favorite English teacher, announced that he wanted...

I’ve never been much of a singer, but as a kid I loved to sing children’s songs to anybody who would listen. Think off-key, dramatic, and really, really LOUD. Be it “Itsy Bitsy Spider” or “Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star,” I warbled them all until my sister announced that she wanted to be adopted just to get away from me. I sang “Old MacDonald Had A Farm” so many times that my Uncle Leon suggested that I change my initials from EE to EIEIO.  By age six, I had a repertoire of way too many lyrics that I knew by heart....

I really admire my friends and relatives who pursue woodworking as a hobby and turn out beautiful pieces, one of which now adorns my curio shelf. Neither my dad nor I had any talent that way. I couldn’t identify one piece of wood from another, unless it still belonged to a living tree, and even then only because I sometimes recognize an individual leaf or two. But the exceptions, thanks to my dad, are spruce and maple. These I knew all about because of the incredible musical talents of my father’s siblings, especially my Uncle Ernie, Uncle Billy, and Aunt...

I’m just old enough to remember that, in the 1950’s, clerks in the fine menswear section of department stores wore starched French cuffs. I’m sure they were wearing starched collars, too, but I was just a little kid then and therefore much shorter than the clerks. It was their shirt cuffs, nearer to my eye level, that caught my attention. In high school, I discovered that a “French cuff” meant that the end of the shirt sleeve was folded back upon itself on both sides. The cuff was then closed in what was called “the kissing style” (ah, the French...

During my senior year at Indiana University, I was a Resident Assistant —or “RA”— in a freshman dormitory, Wissler Hall. I had thirty residents on my floor. I took my job seriously and tried to look after these young men with as much concern and advice as I could muster, since I wanted them to achieve their full undergraduate potential. I might have overdone the hands-on guidance just a tad. Within about a month, they had dubbed me “Wissler’s Mother.”  Although there was an age difference of just three years between me and my freshmen, they saw me as prehistoric...