The Lacuna

The following was written the day prior to my trip to Atlanta for the Foreign Service exam. I left it unfinished and unpublished because I found it diffucult to focus.

Every morning around 11 o'clock I get a text. It's a text from dictionary.com - "The word of the day." I signed up for the word of the day texts to increase my vocabulary so I sound enlightened and erudite. However, more often than not I recieve a word that is either completely arcane and colloquial, or it is simply a word that has NEVER been in the standard vocabulary of ANYBODY. For instance, the word plenipotentiary (adjective, invested with full power). Come on, even history's most repressive autocrats have never refered to themselves as plenipotentiary. Even the Lord, He who is in fact plenipotentiary, never says that.

Similarly, the word lacuna (a gap or missing part, as in a manuscript, series, or logical argument) seems entirely obsolete from all language...

And that was all I wrote. I was too pre-occupied by thoughts of the impending exam that I simply could not focus on writing this inane blog entry. But then, the very next day as I was sitting on the outbound flight, something caught my eye. It was a book sitting on the lap of a fellow passenger. As I looked closer I read the title: The Lacuna. I couldn't believe it: here I had just mocked the word lacuna and labeled it as obsolete.

It left me feeling a little dull-witted. It seems there was a lacuna in my vocabulary.