Le mot juste

I learned a new word today but I am afraid to use it for fear that someone overhearing me will think, My God she has a strange accent or That’s not the word she really meant to use. The word is ‘parlous’ and it was in an article in the New York Times used to describe the economy -  “  . . . he was dead-on about the parlous state of the economy, even though he was affluent and not directly threatened by it.”

It stopped me in my tracks. I read many diverse things in the run of a day, but this was my first encounter with the word parlous. It seemed relatively easy to decipher from a contextual standpoint. The economy has been anything but healthy for a year or two, so parlous must mean uncertain. I went to the Oxford English Dictionary online to find these synonyms: grave, grievous, hazardous, jeopardizing, menacing, dangerous, perilous, risky, serious, threatening, unhealthy, unsafe, venturesome. Ah, yes. I was right.

Then I spotted the very thing that could make me look and sound a fool if I were to begin using this useful word. Perilous. Hey, that sounds very close to parlous. Someone will surely think I meant to say, or worse yet, write perilous.  A deeper look would be required to root out some etymology so I would at least have a defense prepared if someone challenged me. Oh, what fun!

How I love words! A dear friend and mentor of mine told me once that I truly was a wordsmith because of the way I continually sought out new ones to add to my vocabulary. It is a bit of a point of pride for me to find the right word, le mot juste, for a given situation.

I do my research though. I am fearful of being called to task for improper usage by some pseudo-scholarly type. That feeling of scorn brings back a memory of fifth grade and being asked by Miss Wright to remain after a geography class about indigenous peoples. It was 1964, and well before political correctness, so she and we would have called them Indians. She had written on the blackboard the word teepee as one of our spelling words. Why I felt it necessary to do what I did next I do not know to this day. I had done plenty of my own reading from books in our home about native culture, and had read this same word alternately spelled tipi many times. So, I asked Miss Wright if I could use the other spelling on my test as it was an accepted form.  She said an emphatic no and her face grew red.

When I compliantly remained after the others had left the classroom, she explained through gritted teeth that although the word might very well be spelled tipi in some books it was spelled teepee in the book we were using and that was the way we would spell it on our test. I still wasn’t satisfied. Then she ended this little lesson with a caution. “Don’t try to look smarter than your teacher, Catherine.”

But that’s a whole other story.

I want to use my new word. It might be a parlous decision, but I feel well-armed.