Jul 14, 2022 4 min read

Today’s word is rapacious. For example, anyone who finds it necessary to have a dozen golden toilets in their multiple mansions may be perceived to be rapacious. That word was used today as a journalistic descriptor of a now-deceased African leader who had apparently been overly enthusiastic about garnering possessions. In other words, he was greedy.

When I read that description, my brain flew into high gear with memories of now dozens of mostly deceased acquaintances who readily fell into that category. They were greedy, needy, and usually at some level insecure, narcissistic people who would do almost anything to get more of whatever it was they found value in obtaining that would make them appear successful to the world.

Some of them had been born on third base and acted in public as if they had hit the ball to get there. These folks were usually the most dangerous in their greed quest because they were trying to prove something not only to their family, peers and shallow friends, but also to themselves.

I’ll readily admit that when some erudite journalist uses a descriptive word or phrase like rapacious that somehow had slipped through my own thesaurus-enriched vocabulary, I wonder how many thousands more exceptional words I’ve missed.

Of course, for many people, even the description of my lack of command for a semi-commonly used word like rapacious may seem to be a non sequitur. How could one move into this septuagenarian phase of their existence without having that particular verbal arrow in their robust quiver of vocabulary alternatives?

My dad, the son of uneducated Italian immigrants, fully understood the potential power of a strong Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. In fact, it was his passion to ensure that his youngest son possessed at least one asset that he participated in with complete abandon. At a time when no other father that I knew of did something like this in our little town, my dad somehow found a bookstore that sold boxes of vocabulary cards. Each card had a word like rapacious on one side and its pronunciation and definition on the other.

Starting in seventh grade, he’d sit with me, assign me five or six words, go through their pronunciation and definition with me, and then challenge me to use those words in sentences over the next 24 hours. It was a kind of fun father-son game that we played for the better part of my junior high school years.

Truthfully, though, it started on a less committed level when I was only about 5 years old, and he taught me to use really highfalutin words to describe my need to go to the bathroom. I’ll spare you the descriptions, but both words ended in “-ate.” Of course, the adults got a great kick out of hearing a little kid say those big words and that probably played a significant part in my wanting to continue to dazzle them with words like rapacious.

Since then, I’ve learned a lot about people, done a tremendous amount of writing, and quickly figured out that not only do most people not care about those big words, but they also often find them to be offensive and snooty. In fact, a saw an article the other day that indicated about 130 million Americans are stuck at about the sixth-grade reading level. Keeping in mind that over 300 million Chinese kids are honor students, our American reality has become KISS: keep it simple, stupid.

Consequently, I’ve instructed my family to have something uncomplicated placed on my grave marker like, “Here lies Nick. No wonder he’s dead. He tripped on a rock and hit his head.” Instead of this phrase which is unreservedly too loquacious: “Here rests Nick, an abysmal disgrace. His vocabulary was robust, and so was his waist.”

Anyway, my dad passed on 7-5-75, and he was in my heart and brain today. Thanks, Dad.

Nick Jacobs of Windber is a health-care consultant and author of two books.