When I say, or write, the word beverage, I always smile. The positive associations between that word and my delight were installed a long, long time ago, when I was very very young. Let me explain.
I did a search for the word beverage. Hard to believe I’ve never told this story on the blog before. “It’s a core formative memory, and I link it, at least in my head, to another core memory, one of the earliest behaviors I can remember in my mental chronology of myself.
As I’ve written about before, I learned to read at an incredibly early age. It was pre-Kindergarten, I’m almost sure of it. The family legend is that when we would all go somewhere in the car, I would read out the signs on the side of the road. I associated the primary colors and simple four or five letter words, and through questions of my parents and repetition, cracked the code of the English language.
We’d pull up to a Stop sign and I’d say “Stop!” We’d pull on to a highway and I’d see the yellow sign and shout “Yield!” I loved words and reading, and I wanted to share this mystic secret with everyone around me.
To this day I have a deep-seated urge to say out loud traffic signs when I’m driving. I warn new friends about it when we go somewhere; my old friends are surely used to the behavior by now.
My family tells another legend about my reading, though I don’t know which came first. My mom told the story of walking in to the living room one Sunday and saw me and my 13-month older sister laying down looking at the colorful Sunday comics from the newspaper. Except as mom watched, we weren’t just looking at the pictures. I was reading them to my sister.
This connects to beverage, I promise you. Where would I have seen the word beverage? Why I would have seen it on menus in diners and restaurants. Picture us now, on those road trips and nights out, the Moon Clan approaching a counter to order, or sitting down with menus, and the little tow-headed round faced boy shouting out “Beverage!” as soon as I spotted it.
My mouth loved the shape and feel of the word. The hard B, the similar but softened V, the buzzy G. A linguist who applies Grimm’s Law could tell you if those sounds are connected; maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. I just love them, in that order, all together.
Dad would chuckle and ask me if I wanted a beverage, which I did (I preferred 7-Up over Sprite, Pepsi over Coke). Mostly though I wanted to find that three sylable word in the sea of words before me, and yell it out like I was playing a game of Bingo and I’d filled out my card. Beverage!
Knowing this, it feels weird to me that I have used the word so little in the decades of runnning this blog. It only appears in eight posts, which seems low. This word is a source of a happy memory for me; I smile when I say or write it. I don’t feel any shame or embarassement. I learned to human by learning a game with words. I won’t deny myself that joy moving foward.
Beverage!