My favorite word to this day is one I know not the name but the definition of. The word, is a name for the exact moment when a child learns that what they know is not what others know. For example when a very young child puts a toy somewhere and expects the parents to know where it is. Until they don't... and they learn what it means to hide the toy.
"Do you understand?" is a rhetorical question. "I do understand" is a lie. Two statements whose only common ground is proximity.
Its fair to say that its generous to call the previous statement a misleading perspective but consider the following: "Why did the chicken cross the road?" As child I knew the answer: "To get to the other side." A silly stupid kids joke whose comedy existed in the obvious answer and the resulting soft slug to the shoulder. Twenty years later though I contemplate the phrase again over cereal, my dumb jaw going slack as I realize the "other side" was the after life from the common phrase "See you on the other side" right before a hero in a cheesy movie shudders his last breath.
The words didn't mean the same thing anymore. I did not understand.Or did I? Perhaps at the time? Am I the child just now and again reliving the word I recall not the name of? A grown man of thirty? It may surprise you now to learn that some college was duped into graduating me with honors.The fools.
Somewhere wandering in my years I learned to see the world differently. The chicken is a lighthearted example of something I look back on with an empty profoundness. Countless times I have said "I understand" and indeed I did, and at the same time I didn't. I knew the words, the nouns, the subjects, the verbs the spelling the definitions....I did. All of it. But now...lessons from my father, mother, teachers and friends come back to me and at times they hit harder. They mean so much more, and I ponder: "What have I missed?". The brain gnaws on itself.
It is impossible to know what they meant. The real meaning. The decades of perspective and experience each person knowingly or not tried to cram into words. Things I lacked the living part of yet.
So when I foolishly ask "Do you understand?", I expect you to wisely say back "No."
Three cheers to anyone who knows the name of my favorite word, of which I've foolishly misplaced.
