| Sunny Side Up January 30, 2002 �2002, Kathleen Gibson Two little letters�..one big chuckle I love words. They�re my favorite toys. I juggle, stack, string, and sort them, arrange and rearrange them. I make them up sometimes, hunt them down mercilessly�drag them from their lolling places in Webster�s lair to make them work for me, to say precisely what I intend to say. If they don�t, I fire them. Delete, delete. All this playing tends to make me a slow writer, but I don�t mind that a tad. I�d rather put out three pieces of good writing than ten poor ones. As a reader, I appreciate that kind of writing; as a writer, I feel my readers deserve it. But sometimes my passion for words backfires, as it did when I wrote the recent column about my cat. The opening sentence in the manuscript I e-mailed for publication read, �The cat Moses is performing his morning ablutions.� My local paper, however, printed it this way: The cat Moses is performing his morning absolutions. Two tiny letters had wormed their way between the ab and the lu; neatly converting a Protestant parsonage cat to Catholicism�.a member of the priesthood, no less. I read it twice, first blaming my new bifocals. I took them off, read it again, my beak nearly touching the paper. Nope. Moses was still sitting on the black and white striped fabric of his favorite chair performing his morning absolutions. My inner child�the school spelling bee champion�cringed, and if you must know, stamped her size nines. �Uh oh. The Catholics are going to have fun with this,� chuckled The Preacher, reading over my shoulder. But I was horrified. It was my own fault. I�d used an unfamiliar word; it was caught by someone or some computer as a spelling error and deftly corrected. Except that the context of the new word was all awry. Two of my Catholic readers responded. �I wonder what you meant,� one said. �That word in that context doesn�t make any sense.� She went on to explain in some detail the meaning of the word absolution: an act of reconciliation, forgiveness�to be absolved from one�s sins by a priest...� �That�s quite a cat you�ve got, (that can forgive his own sins).� said another admiringly, graciously making light of the misused word, writing that he wasn�t in the least offended, but that perhaps I could run a little correction in my next column. Consider it done, Nathan. For the record, the word I intended, �ablution�, means, simply, a washing of the body, especially in a religious context�and anyone with cats knows they do it very religiously. But I�ve already decided that next time I run that column I�m changing the first sentence to what it should have been in the first place: Moses the cat is taking his morning bath. It�s the sensible solution to the �absolution, ablution� convolution. Oh dear. I don�t think I can help it. Would you mind dusting off your dictionary? Lord, help my pride. And grant absolution. You can respond to this column at [email protected] |