In response to Daily Post’s Daily Prompt: Dictionary, Shmictionary
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental… ALRIGHT, fine, it’s not. It happened to me.
It happened long time ago when I read the words “faux pas” in a book I was reading. By context I felt the word to be a wrong doing of sort which was correct, in a sense. The fact that I decided to use a new word without looking at the dictionary was already a huge blunder but I decided to do it with a word for which the pronunciation mattered a lot.
‘This just in, the world famous boxer has just been tested positive for illegal drugs just before Olympics. The boxer’s manager claims that the test might have resulted positive due to the presence of the substance in his prescribed medicines. Investigations are on going…’ the TV blared as my friends and I played Monopoly on a weekend. We kept the TV on for reasons which were never clear to me but all of us had accepted that it would be on. I guess, we needed some sort of noise to constantly run in the background since all of us had gotten so used to it.
‘Oh man!’ one of friends complained probably in attempt to distract us from the fact he had landed on an already owned property. ‘I really liked this boxer, he shouldn’t be banned.’
‘If he got caught it is really a fox pass on his part,’ I shrugged.
‘A what?’
‘You know, a fox pass. When someone does something wrong.’
‘Oh! You mean faux pas! You didn’t even use it correctly. What a failed show off you are!’
I hung my beetroot red face as everyone laughed at my hilarious “fox pass“.
True story: The first time I ever read the word, “Chihuahua,” I sounded it out phonetically: Chi-who-ah-who-ah. I was not a child, but grown-up with a college education. It’s been the bane of my existence ever since.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I guess we all have been there sometime. Some err with a more intimate group of friends, while some blunder publicly.
LikeLiked by 1 person