Reading Phenomenons

I love to read. I always have. I was the annoying girl in elementary school who always won the 'who read the most books this school year" award. I spent my summers at the library or waiting for the bookmobile to arrive on my street every other Wednesday. I was nerdy that way.

I also love it when books imitate life or this other oddity that may happen to you too.......whenever I learn a new word, I start noticing it all over the place. For example, I posted last weekend about our family playing The Dictionary Game. One of the words that we found was 'stevedore' (it's someone who loads and unloads ships). I had never heard of that word before last weekend. So, I'm currently reading The Year of Living Biblically, and guess what word pops out at me yesterday? The author describes someone as looking like a 'stevedore.'

Another time, I was helping my daughter with a vocabulary quiz and she had to learn the meaning of a 'troglodyte' (cave man). Not a word that I had previously been familiar with. Since then, that word has been appearing everywhere. I even heard someone use it on a television show recently. Do we notice words once we know their meanings and just ignore words that we don't understand and skim right over them? I ponder odd things, don't I?

I'm saving my best book story for last. A couple of summers ago, I was reading Freakanomics for my book club. I was finishing it up one morning and came upon the chapter about the socioeconomic impact of names. The author talked about twins named "Orangejello" and "Lemonjello" (you have to say it with a french accent to get the real effect). I had to laugh when I read about that. A few hours later, College Daughter comes home from her volunteer job at the hospital and proceeds to tell me about these new girls who are twins that had just started working with her. She's telling me how the volunteer coordinator was introducing the twins to the group and announces them as "Orangejello" and "Lemonjello." College Daughter says the group was looking around at each other, attempting to hold back the laughter that these names would obviously invoke. I, of course, fall out of my chair while she's telling me this story, not believing that I had just read about these exact same names in Freakanomics.

True life is either stranger than fiction, or equal to it.