the grief of knowing too much too soon
I don't usually get into questions like this, "what is your favorite ________?" Too many words, too many contexts. A favorite here today might be a pet peeve there yesterday and just another word yonder tomorrow. But this knowing too much too soon reminded me of a situation I got into in grammar school, maybe 5th grade (age 10) when we had read a story from Australia that had the word kookaburra in it. The glossary at the end of the story gave as a definition for kookaburra "a laughing jackass". Many of y'all know that this is a phrase used instead of kookaburra in much the same way as we might refer to tuna as "chicken of the sea". I don't remember if I had correctly sussed from the story or whether I looked it up elsewhere, but when we were asked to define kookaburra on the quiz, I said that it was a bird. I was the only one, including the teacher, that had the right answer, so, of course, I was marked wrong. I didn't recognize it at the time but I think that was when I decided that sometimes people will be so stuck in their wrongness that there is no point in trying to correct them; the best thing is just quietly know that you are right.
