The Challenge of Words
Monday, November 06, 2017
 |
| Don Tirso de Irureta Goyena |
While watching the last few minutes of Chris Hayes on MSNBC
and the first few minutes of the Rachel Maddow show, Hayes used the expression casus belli and Maddow interregnum.
I knew instantly what those expressions from Latin meant, not a priori but a posteriori.
Much is said these days how journalism has been stultified. I am happy to see that the prediction of an end of days for words has been not entirely correct.
For me my venture into knowledge of words paradoxically came
when I taught high school in Mexico City. I wrote about it here and here. Since then I
can thank reading as having helped me along to increase my vocabulary.
My Rebecca who is now 20 and is living through a not too
good post teen existence always asked me the meaning of any word I might have
used that she did not immediately understand. She had this curiosity that
excited me and I constantly would bring up not usual words knowing she would
ask.
I hope that when her issues are resolved that this curiosity
for the meaning of words will come back.
My grandfather Don Tirso de Irureta Goyena was a member (one
of a very few) of the Real Academia Española who was from the Philippines.
When I was a young boy his wife, my grandmother Lolita,
