Definitive Jest

Entry:    precocity (n.)

Definition:  The quality of being precocious; early maturity, esp. an unusual degree of advancement in some capacity; premature development.

Other:    Great word!  Also a source of deep and likely unresolved lexical anguish on the part of your blogger.

At one point in junior or senior high, I was reading part of a story aloud to the rest of the class.  I didn’t recognize precocious and mispronounced it as precious.  The teacher stopped and corrected me, to at least a few laughs.  

And it strikes me that I’ve probably overimagined almost the entire scenario.  I’m always very conscious of pronunciation and my shortcomings therein; some of this I think, comes from, precocious.  

Still, in the high-water marks of memory and pronunciation, tops goes to one H.B.’s substituting the word orgasm into “The cat is an example of an organism.” 

SNOOT score:   2

Page:   1

Source: Oxford English Dictionary, bad memories