Hay Fever

We spend more than a little time at my house enjoying word play. I say we enjoy it, I do and my family seems to, but it could easily be just the time in grade they have spent with me. Tolerance, adaptation; maybe they are just humoring me, but words have always fascinated me. Just pick any random word and assign it a new meaning in a sentence and it’s funny; “The doctor said he wanted to check my pilaf.” I don’t care who you are, that’s funny.

A few mornings ago my daughter and I were discussing the possibility of her taking the allergy medicine she did at this time last year. She hasn’t needed it since last summer, but she was beginning to get the same nagging cough that sent us for the prescription last spring. I was glad that she had been able to stop taking it and I even suggested that since the weather was warming she might need it again for her “hay fever”. I didn’t think much about using the term hay fever, but from the look on her face I knew that I may as well have said “After school let’s dance around the Victrola”! Come to find out hay fever is not a word used commonly in modern vocabularies.

But the more times I said the word, the funnier it became. What a tragic sounding term for a rather mild affliction! “My father was never the same after his lengthy bought with hay fever” or “The great hay fever outbreak of 1916 dealt one of deadliest blows ever to our troops abroad”. Sounds so much worse than “I have allergies to pollen”; pollen really sounds like some kind of tasty fruit anyway! “I love honey and pollen yogurt”. Maybe I’m crazy, but I think we all assign our own images to words that often have no bearing on what they actually mean.

So why not rename a few items ourselves? Give them new names and make them sound a little nicer; kids do this all the time. When my daughter was in preschool she told me one evening that a kid in her class had “cometed”. I was picturing a falling star or flaming meteorite and was very disappointed when I discovered that was she really meant was that he had vomited! Since this day I’ve been convinced that comet is a much nicer way to describe the act of throwing up and I use it often. We probably wouldn’t survive as a species if each family had a private language, but it sure is fun to entertain the thought sometimes!