Taking Your Meaning
by Tom Scocca
My eighth-grader showed up in the doorway of the kitchen with a sheet of vocabulary words he wanted to go over. They were reading Night, by Elie Wiesel, so they were being quizzed on words written in adult literary diction—billeted and manacled and conflagration—and while I worked on dinner I helped him nail down the ones he wasn't sure of. In the middle of it, though, he came out with veritable.
Veritable? Veritable means...veritable. The portion of my mind that I'd set aside for eighth-grade English while the rest of me focused on dinner was unable to manage this. I stopped and tried to think harder. Veritable, I told him, is a word you use when you're saying something as a figure of speech, like, uh, OK, so if you had a...snowman that was like six feet tall, and all the other snowmen around were three or four feet tall, you might say "That's a veritable snow-giant"—?
Or: if nobody else has money at all, but you have enough money to buy a sandwich, you have a veritable fortune. Or—um. OK. Veritable! I've been reading and writing for more than 50 years, most of that time professionally. People pay me to use words right and to explain how they're used. How was I stuck on this?
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