WORDS AND PHRASES

Wrestle

I was about seven years old when this word betrayed me in summer camp. I was one of the younger campers. I think the oldest age you could be in the camp was twelve or something, maybe even ten, and the youngest was maybe five or six. I just remember feeling pretty small in that camp, especially around the boys. I was drawing at a table alone when I heard a couple boys behind me talking about wrestling and other tough-boy things. It was the free-time part of the camp day, so I thought it was a good time to prove I was just as big as they were without causing a scene. I can't wrestle them, I thought, but I can spell the word and then they’ll think my brain is big. So I walked over to their table, sat down, and started a conversation.

“What're you talking about?” I asked.

“Wrestling,” said the bigger boy.

“I can spell wrestle.”

“Oh yeah?”

I remember being super confident because I knew there was a silent T in the word, and it’d for sure impress them that I knew that.

“R-E-S-T-L-E.”

The boys started laughing.

“There's a W before the R! It’s W-R-E-S-T-L-E.”

I felt so stupid, but I probably played it off and said something like, “oh yeah, I knew that,” and then just went back to my table to draw. To this day, I have never misspelled that word, and I promise I never will.

Humility

This word will always confuse me. Whenever I hear this word, I think it means something funny. I think of humor. Apparently it means humbleness, but I refuse to believe that. I guess a good clue is that it sounds like humiliate, but still, humiliate means to make someone feel ashamed. Humbleness isn't the same as shame. So how could humility mean humbleness? It should mean something like the state someone is in after they’ve been humiliated or something. For example,

“Sally became overwhelmed with humility when Bobby pointed out the holes in her shoes.”

I’ve only really heard humility in context in the Bible during the readings in church. It has to do with living a humble life, not judging people or gossiping. In that sense, I do believe in humility. However, the reality is: I could be listening to a reading with my full attention, fully understanding, but as soon as I hear “humility,” I’m lost, and all I can focus on in trying to understand what the heck humility means.