"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less.” --from Alice in Wonderland
I was thinking of Humpty Dumpty the other day while editing an article by a writer who used the word “apogee” to mean “a sudden insight” or “revelation.” I thought the word she was searching for was “epiphany” and I changed it accordingly. She saw the edit and emailed to say that’s not the word she wanted to use. “But you can’t use ‘apogee’ that way,” I countered. She replied that she had always understood “apogee” to mean a higher understanding or a new, more enlightened view of something. The exchange didn’t end when I sent her the dictionary definition of apogee (which is literally “the most distant point in an orbit from the body being orbited” or metaphorically, the highest point or apex of a trend). She finally wrote back, conceding that I had won the argument, but I could tell that she was somewhat bothered by the outcome.
I think I understand her annoyance, because I’ve had this same feeling myself over certain words. You use a word over and over, and you think you’re using it appropriately, only to discover that it has that particular meaning only to you. Still, the meaning you’ve assigned to the word is real to you, and when you discover it’s not real to the rest of the world, you feel a sense of loss, as if a bit of your vocabulary has been unfairly taken away. You would really prefer it if your readers could come to appreciate the word “apogee” just as you’ve used it in your sentence. Sure, maybe that requires a little mind-stretching on the reader’s part, but what would be so wrong with that?
Which brings me to some other words that have caused some disappointment when the speaker discovered they didn’t signify the thing he or she had in mind. My friend Rick grew up enjoying a dish that his mother, his aunts, his grandmother, and his whole extended family called “gas house eggs.” It’s made by taking an ordinary slice of bread, cutting a hole in the middle, putting it in a buttered frying pan, and then cracking an egg into the middle of the hole. When the egg is cooked sunny-side-up, the dish is ready to serve for breakfast. Many years after leaving home, Rick was sitting in the booth of a diner at breakfast time and saw a waitress serving this same dish to someone at another table. “You make gas house eggs!” he exclaimed in delight. (He had thought his grandmother had invented the dish.) But the waitress looked blank until she figured it out: “Oh, you mean our Rocky Mountain toast
! We’ve had this on our diner menu since we opened back in the ‘50s.” It was like a blow, Rick told me, when he found out his family’s secret recipe was a commonplace thing, well known under a different name. Since then he’s learned that his childhood favorite also goes by “frog in the hole,” “egg in a basket,” "sunshine toast," and about a dozen other names. He’s still miffed about it.
Which brings me to some other words that have caused some disappointment when the speaker discovered they didn’t signify the thing he or she had in mind. My friend Rick grew up enjoying a dish that his mother, his aunts, his grandmother, and his whole extended family called “gas house eggs.” It’s made by taking an ordinary slice of bread, cutting a hole in the middle, putting it in a buttered frying pan, and then cracking an egg into the middle of the hole. When the egg is cooked sunny-side-up, the dish is ready to serve for breakfast. Many years after leaving home, Rick was sitting in the booth of a diner at breakfast time and saw a waitress serving this same dish to someone at another table. “You make gas house eggs!” he exclaimed in delight. (He had thought his grandmother had invented the dish.) But the waitress looked blank until she figured it out: “Oh, you mean our Rocky Mountain toast
! We’ve had this on our diner menu since we opened back in the ‘50s.” It was like a blow, Rick told me, when he found out his family’s secret recipe was a commonplace thing, well known under a different name. Since then he’s learned that his childhood favorite also goes by “frog in the hole,” “egg in a basket,” "sunshine toast," and about a dozen other names. He’s still miffed about it.
