Image via WikipediaI’m feeling a little icky today. I think Cinderella has shared her tummy bug with me. The one that entailed a midnight change of sheets and PJ’s earlier this week. As I was looking for ways to describe the revoltingness of the cleanup (don’t worry, I’m not going to) the only word I could think of was “yukky”.
It’s been over seven years since I left the grown up world of work and entered the other grown up world of being a stay at home mum and raising kids. I’ve seen a lot of changes in myself over that time. My attitude to a lot of things has changed, I’ve become better at housework, I can make tears disappear and haggle with the best of them.
One of the stranger things that’s happened is the nosedive in my vocabulary. My words have gone. It’s a side effect of having 80% of my conversations with kids, and I’m sure I’m not the only person it’s happened to. But it’s frustrating.
I have conversations with mums that work and I feel like such a bumpkin. They use big words. They use flourishes. I say “yukky”. Do you know how annoying it is when having a disagreement with The Thinker not being able to think of a word in the middle of my killer argument?
Blogging has helped. I have time to sit here and think. I have my trusty thesaurus just a keystroke away. I haven’t quite reached the point of carrying one around with me though.
For most of last year, it was even worse. The CML medication I was taking made me even more fuzzy than the kids do and I would forget the simplest of words. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make them move from the steel vault that is my mind to the tip of my tongue. Words like “frequent” or “cheque” or…um, I’m having trouble remembering.
Perhaps I need to stop reading so many fairy stories and start reading literature. I could stop watching Playschool and Spongebob and tune into The 7:30 Report and Parliament – oh no, wait, that’s more infantile conversations (used my thesaurus for that one).
Perhaps I need to risk sounding like a complete dunce and seek out more conversations with people who still have their words.
Not being a SAHM, I think I’ve escaped the vocab-shrink… but boy, I know the feeling on the word-block thing. Happens to me all the time – I start a sentence knowing all the words I’m going to use, then lose one. Work, home, wherever. Usually at work. Gah.
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A friend and I were discussing this topic just the other day, along with when out with adults, sometimes feeling like you don’t have anything interesting (non child related) to say. Blogging has helped a bit with this, but them blogging and social media is like gibberish to so many people as well!
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I asked my daughter if she had to go to the potty the other day. She is 13. She was not amused.
It does help to converse with people over 4 feet tall from time to time to prevent word shrinkage.
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I also have a copy of Thesaurus close to my computer. It has always helped me “talk” better with my blog posts.
Lately I’ve been noticing that incidence of word blackout has increased on my part. Sometimes friends and students finish my sentences for me. Senioritis, I think.
I’m so glad some other people experience this too 🙂 My husband has been laughing at me all weekend about this post. He keeps saying big words and then “oh, sorry…do you know what that means?” All in good fun of course.
@Naomi – it’s bad enough when it happens at home, I can imagine it’s doubly frustrating at work!
@PlanningQueen – the conversations topics is another one for me too. You can almost see the vacant look come across some peoples’ faces when you start talking about your own days. I have actually been helping one of my kids’ teachers learn about blogging, so I guess I should view that as a plus 🙂
@Carol – don’t tell me it lasts that long!
@Princess – despite my husband teasing me, I’ve noticed he has been sneaking a look at my thesaurus every now and then too 😉
[…] has deteriorated to such a level that it would just be plain embarrassing. It’s been on the slide for a […]
@PlanningQueen – the conversations topics is another one for me too. You can almost see the vacant look come across some peoples’ faces when you start talking about your own days. I have actually been helping one of my kids’ teachers learn about blogging, so I guess I should view that as a plus
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