Chapter One, Exaggerate

My mom left a comment on her birthday post saying that the things I had learned from her could be chapters in her autobiography. But until then, I figured they could be chapters on my blog for funny stories and antidotes.

So without further ado, chapter one:

Very early on, my mother realized I was not a speller. With words like 'mazagine' and 'gril' (instead of 'girl') showing up pretty regularly, I’m sure she started to watch my spelling and reading to make sure I wasn’t dyslexic. I wasn’t, and am not. I just never took the time to proof read or to think about what it was I was putting down on paper. Spelling class and tests were miserable for me and I dreaded playing the popcorn spelling game in Mr. Inman’s fourth grade class because I knew I’d be one of the first people to have to sit down.


Let’s just face it. I wasn’t much for schooling; I liked being social and creating stuff. I didn’t like memorizing how words were spelt or how the hypotenuse of something did something or other to something else. All that information is all well and good; it just wasn’t up my right brained, want to be gluing and coloring something alley. My mom and dad told both my brother and I very early on that classes that were all about memorization were not classes we were allowed to perform poorly in. They could understand not grasping theories or understanding concepts that were of a vague nature. We were still required to learn the information, but if we didn’t thrive in those classes, it was ok. The classes they were talking about were spelling, history, etc. Things that didn’t change, that weren’t affected by a million possible options or other outcomes. I understood what they meant and I respected that. It didn’t mean that those classes were any easier for me so my mom got creative when helping me learn how to spell words. All of the mnemonic devices she taught me I have forgotten, except for one. Finding something to work for the word “exaggerate” took not only a lot of brain power on her side but a lot of naivety and memorization on mine.

As a second grader, the word 'exaggerate' seemed like the most impossible word to remember in the entire world (and I’m not exaggerating here, it really did). How was my seven year old brain supposed to recall all of those letters and in the right order?! My mom worked on a saying for quite a few hours before coming up with this little beauty: “every time a girl gets excited, rockets and trees explode”.

I know what you’re thinking. Where did the word ‘time’ come from for the letter ‘x’?! Well as a first grader, I didn’t question it. Not knowing my multiplication tables or what multiplication even was for that matter played a part into that and I just went with it, but the thinking behind the “time” was that when you see an ‘x’ in multiplication you say ‘times’. Ok, so it isn’t the most fool proof mnemonic device but it never bothered me, I remembered that ‘time’ stood for ‘x’ and ta-dah, I could spell that word correctly. I even remember my mom driving down the road one night quizzing me on my words and being able to recall the entire device and regurgitate the correctly spelled word. I was thrilled with myself. I had no idea, at the age of seven, slurping on a Sonic slushie in the backseat of my mom’s car, spelling words, how often I would use that device and think about my mom.

Since the invention of computerized word processing my brain has decided that memorized spelling can take a backseat (no earlier pun intended) to spell check. I have to say this lack of desire to spell things correctly didn’t actually start until college although I’d been typing papers and emails for quite some time before the laptop emerged. There were still multiple teachers that required hand written papers in junior high and high school and my brain hadn’t quite lost its elasticity for words. Nope, not until I got a laptop and went to college, that’s when it all went downhill. Please don’t think that I’m a frivolous typist and that I have lost all of my recognition for correctly spelled words while I am typing because that is not the case. But for those longer words that take a little more thought and effort, well let’s just say I try and get close enough in order to get my right click action on and find the word in the queue. I remember the first rough draft I hand wrote in college for a paper and how ridiculously hard my brain had to work to remember how to spell some of the words that I regularly glazed over via the computer. I felt incredibly ignorant and ashamed. No one knew how hard I had to think about the proper spelling and all the words that I got down onto the paper were spelled correctly but it took some internal work to get myself there. It was embarrassing. I’ve since tried to put forth a little more effort so that my brain doesn’t completely turn to mush but still find myself thinking “eh, that should be close enough to find the right word”.

I don’t do that with “exaggerate” though. Not that it is a terribly difficult word for an adult to know how to spell but it doesn’t even seem to register with my brain before I have it typed or written on paper. And you better believe, that every single time I write it down that the entire saying runs through my brain and I smile.

I was in college when I thought about what the saying meant. I had never done that before, I’d always just repeated the necessary words in the necessary order. I didn’t stop to think that they formed a sentence and a somewhat dirty sentence at that. If we’re talking dirty here, my mom knew that every time she got “excited”, in her world, rockets and trees were exploding. And right on sister. I’ve had my fair share of exploding rockets and trees. It’s funny to think that for 15 years, I silently repeated that device in my head never thinking twice about what it meant and at an early age, even if I had, wouldn’t have understood it.