Adventures in Vocabulary

In the last three days, I've just happened to stumble into conversations that have resulted in new vocabulary being produced.

Situations like that are fun. They stimulate your thought process.

As a baby, our vocabulary fun comes from trying to replicate the sounds coming out of the mouth of the red-headed guy looming you going , "Say DADDY!"; as a teen it's found coming up with new slang.

Then you become an adult and you just have these random conversations that are really about nothing, but the result of which does make you ponder further things, laugh about them, and then end up blogging about them.

1. Evolution of perception

Some of us were talking at work about how things change as you get older, go through life in the real-world workforce, and deal with adult issues. A co-worker involved in this conversation summed it up with the following, "It's weird. I find myself not giving a crap about things that I really used to when I was younger; and now I'm giving a crap about totally new, more mature things that I never thought would be a big deal to me." At this point another coworker walks by (he hadn't really been actively involved in the conversation, but I guess he was listening to most of it) and says, "It's called evolution of perception. Get used to it."

2. The Bubble Corollary

People live in bubbles. They socialize in bubbles. They establish bubbles no matter where they go, whether they like it or not. Sometimes we don't like to step out of our bubble. With some issues, we refuse to go outside the bubble. We often let the bubble cloud our judgment. Sometimes the bubble moves from the church classroom to the pool. This is called "The Bubble Corollary" This was the discussion we had last night during a gathering of friends from church at a pool party that lasted past midnight. This leads directly into the establishment of the third upcoming phrase.

3. Pruning point

The "Pruning Point", we established last night, is the point when your entire body has been in the water so long that it feels like your skin has become so wrinkled that it will never snap back into shape. But, at the same time, you don't want to get out of the water because you're either having too much fun or because the water is really warm and you don't want to freeze your ass off getting out. It kind of went down like this --- said party was advertised to start at 5. We got there about 6:15. The guys hovered around the man-food table (chips, salsa, pigs-in-a-blanket, brownies) and the girls hovered around the woman-food table (cheese dip, crackers and vegetables) until around 7. Then came pool-time. Mostly just floating or lounging around in the water, chatting, chicken fighting, and five or six rounds of cannonball contests up until around midnight. Then the brakes started to come on after people started realizing they had hit their pruning point and started to depart. Five plus hours of being in the pool will do that.