root words, latin and greek

if you went to high school in carl junction, missouri in the eighties, you sat in a classroom with mike lawson. you probably would have stumbled upon him first as a tenth grader in a biology class. then, you'd see him again the next year for the spectacularly creatively named biology 2. and if you played your cards right, your senior year would include an anatomy and physiology class with the very longsuffering man.

now, here's the thing. even to the untrained eye of a tenth grader, this guy was not really a high school teacher. he would let you know early that your course textbook was the same one colleges use. you'd feel smarter immediately. you'd learn an incredible amount about biology and an even greater amount about the way the world is organized and the way your brain, and good notes, should be organized. you would learn to think and if you were already doing a bit of this, you'd begin to think with an eye toward a larger picture of things. you would begin to see connections. that seemed to be a big issue with this guy, getting students to put things together. sure there were things to memorize, but if you weren't thinking, you'd certainly have an ugly time in those classes. the memorizing wasn't the first thing he pushed.

except for root words. latin root words. mike lawson would tell you you couldn't even think about biology if you didn't know a little something about the language used to set it all down in the first place. so he'd give you a big pile of these latin root words, and maybe a bit of greek, explain a few at a time, and expect you to know them somewhere later on a test. and you probably moaned and groaned about it, about memorization in a class where you really weren't used to using your time for that. but the thing is, if you started looking at these words, you'd see them right there in the biology like he said. and all over the anatomy and physiology. and if you could figure out that hepat meant liver, you'd know forever where the hepatic artery was going. forever, i tell you.

so twenty five years after shoving those first root words in my head, i'm playing a vocabulary game with a fellow teacher and an artist. yes, this really is how i spend my time. the teacher sends us words via email and we're supposed to know them or feel incredible shame. and i know a great deal of them, but the artist, who is of a peculiar artistic temperament, shrugs them off, says they're too easy. i suspect he doesn't exactly live by a code of honor. he looks them up, pretends to know them all. so the teacher, a math teacher, has come up with a new source for words. something to challenge this whining artist. science words. biology words. here are a few for you to swoon over.

haematothermal was his first choice. a nice first choice. like seeing two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and knowing they're going to fit together. haem (or hem) is going to be blood or something dealing with it. like hematoma. and thermal is just warm. thermal underwear. warm blooded. i suggested hot blooded as well because i thought it was funny. math teachers do not always get word humor. evidently artists don't get any humor at all.

dactylitis was the next word to come along. another perfect word. dactyl. fingers. like pterodactyl. wing fingers. and itis. swelling. inflammation. an inflammation of the fingers. how do you know? he says, this math teacher who snarls about the words i'm always dragging around. how, indeed? mike lawson, i tell him. how else?

and then yesterday the sweetie was reading an article about little brown bats because the poor things have been having a hard time around here, dying from some odd disease when they live in mines. it is beginning to look like something we might have done, humans, and folks are writing about it from time to time. and he's reading the name of the bats. myotis lucifugus. he wants to name something that. a dog. a child if someone should accidentally leave one on the doorstep. and i say it's a great name for a bat, a really fine name. i'm not sure about myotis, although otis may have to do with ears, and looking it up i find it means "mouse ear". but it's lucifugus that crawls easily from right in the middle of my brain. i know it the same way i know family i see once in a while. not often enough, but often enough to recall with my whole self. those bits of words have been in my head for a long time. one who flees from light. lux or lucis is all light and gives us lucifer, the morning star, bringer of light. from fugus we get fugue and fugitive. to flee. a little mouse eared critter who flees from the light. absolutely. and the sweetie is astonished about the whole lucifugus thing. he has shared a life with me for a long time. more than ten years. and still he asks, how do you know? and i tell him what i told the math teacher. mike lawson. root words. latin and greek.

so if you grew up in carl junction in the eighties and you went to high school in that same place, you probably drag these things around with you every day and they slip out, escape into the world, not all at once, not all the time, but once in a while, a penny falling from your pocket, a flower in a field of grain. and people marvel at all those words of yours. you will try to explain it once in a while that you are one of many, not a lone accident, about mike lawson and those words, latin and greek, and how you looked at them on the page over and over and then one day they came out of you like water from a fountain. but folks will just look at you funny. and that's just fine. they are simply sick with desire for those words. not even that. for the ability to think of them without even trying, to keep them. they don't even really want to use them. they just want to be able to use them if they wanted. but they can't if they didn't grow up where you grew up when you grew up there and it makes them a little meaner. you can, though, have those words any time you want because they are yours. and you should probably tell mike lawson thanks for that.