She recently worked on a paper about a short story they had to read.
I read it too, because I like that kind of thing.
Ellie worked super hard on the paper.
I proofed early drafts of it but she turned it in without me seeing the final draft.
The other night, her and her friend were at the kitchen island, staring at the screen of Ellie's laptop, reading the teacher's responses to the assignment.
Ellie was curious about a certain comment the teacher made to a word she used to describe the woman in the story.
BUSTY.
No where in the story was there any reference to the woman's physical appearance other than she was tall and plain.
I think busty would've come up.
I asked Ellie if she knew what busty meant and she said,
"Husky."
No…
I told her that wasn't implied in the story either
and, FOR THE LOVE OF PETE,
not a word usually used to describe women.
For me, husky meant a jeans size
at Sears for bigger boys.
Which is terrible.
Her friend didn't know what busty meant either.
I explained and they dissolved into giggles.
Is it possible, busty is a dead adjective?
Not that I'm mad about it…
But how is it that in one generation a word just STOPS being used?
Now, I know, the world needs a good many words to stop being used, but how is it that BUSTY was chosen and not some of the others?
It made me think of McDaniel and how she used the word RAUNCHY because she thought it meant fancy in a tribute essay, for school, to describe my sweet, proper, Christian grandmother.
My grandmother never did anything EVER in a remotely raunchy way.
Including saying the word "cancer"
or "the sugar" (diabetes)
or "divorced" above a whisper.
What happened to using a dictionary?
I was just talking with girlfriends about how we took
HUGE, heavy dictionaries to college with us.
Some were gifted them.
Now there's access to one on the phone.
There is literally NO EXCUSE for using words we don't know the meaning of or even slightly question.
Yet, here we are with raunchy grandmothers and busty fictional women IN MY HOUSE.
It paints a picture, doesn't it?
One my grandmother would be too horrified to look at.
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