My eldest daughter and my son-in-love used to play late night Scrabble. I called it “late night” because the fun only began once the kids were down. Lisa and Bing would break out the board and distribute the letters and invariably get into squabbles about what was a “real” word. My daughter would insist that I be called to arbitrate disputes, and when I answered the one a.m. call, I would hear, “Dad! Is ‘strategery’ a word? Bing says it is, and by the way: You’re on speakerphone.” My daughter has called me from her job — on speakerphone — and made me trot out my knowledge of the definitions and pronunciations of words. I’m like a parlor trick to her, but I’ve managed to maintain an unblemished record with regard to words — at least with my daughter and son-in-love.
Many years ago, I came out of my first retirement to take a job as an artist at the Marble Hill nuclear power plant. I had quit a ten-year job in disgust and had been idling on my lawn during the day and meandering through the English department at Indiana University Southeast in the evening. My next-door neighbor, for whom I had designed a business card, was a technical job recruiter, and had received a request to find an artist for an electrical contractor. He discussed the duties with me and overcame my initial reluctance with a very attractive hourly wage.
My duties for the electrical contractor were to chart the amount of electrical wire “pulled” — installed — each week. I would apply the numbers to a chart and produce and publish a graph of the accomplishments (or failures to meet “targets”). I also published a newsletter geared toward highlighting the happenings around the plant. I reported to an engineer from Woods Hole, Massachusetts. He was a steel-toe boot, tool-belt wearing man who was openly contemptuous of the necessity to have an “artist” on a construction site, and his enmity spilled over into racial hostility, where he would occasionally imply that, should I happen upon his hometown, I might be lynched. I responded in my typically fearful way: “Woods Hole does not want to see the Woods family rolling into town, hellbent on revenge.” We were tethered to each other by a larger bureaucracy, and we worked and jabbed and counterpunched. We were a sideshow, secretly enjoyed by a largely tool-belted audience. One day, this hostile boss overheard a conversation I was having with the personnel recruiter who shared my “double-wide” cubicle and mocked my pronunciation of a word. And in a moment that is part of the lore of the defunct nuclear towers, I turned to him and said: “I am the master of the language, and any error that I might make becomes a part of the popular lexicon.” He stared at me in tight-lipped silence, then turned away. The personnel recruiter, with whom I had developed a friendship, snorted into his hand, and later told some of the few people who were sympathetic to our foreign presence on a construction site. The legend of the “MOL” was born, and I nourished it by responding to the disinterested query of “How are you,” was with an exuberant adjective: “Superb!” (If the question was about how I was “doing,” the adverb would be “superbly.”)
My children’s esteem notwithstanding, I am no master, neither of my fate, nor of the language that I love. I am an earnest student who lets no new word go unnoted, unresearched or unrecorded. But I still like it when my kids call the “Master of the Language.