Word Association

Photo by Andrey Soldatov on Unsplash

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It’s funny how we learn to pair words with meaning.

I suppose the process begins the day your ears can hear the sounds of your family, and it continues on until the sound itself continues on without you.

Sometimes you don’t even realize that the meaning you’ve assigned doesn’t align with everyone else’s, and that your family might call something one thing while someone else would have a completely different label for the same thing.

Like “soda,” for instance. In the South we call the delicious fizzy beverage “soda.” But if you ventured a little deeper into the backwoods, you might hear them refer to soda as “coke,” which to you is a specific kind of soda, but to them is a blanket term for the entire line of carbonated beverages.

And if you happened to travel north of Tennessee into the Midwest, you’d hear them refer to it as “pop,” and you would begin to wrestle with the complicated relationship between you and your father while they would sip their drink contentedly.

I remember the first time I discovered this phenomenon. I was 10 or so and knocked on my friend’s door to see if he could play. He told me that he couldn’t because he had to do his chores, so I of course asked him if he had to rotate, for I was certain that every boy’s mother would yell this word at the top of her lungs when she wanted that chore completed.

My friend looked at me with a confused expression. I looked back at him just as confused. “What kind of crazy person doesn’t rotate,” I thought to myself. It seemed pretty unsanitary to skip that chore. After a few moments of misunderstanding, I explained more fully what I was talking about, thinking him an imbecile for not understanding my perfectly clear language.

As it turns out, not every family refers to doing the laundry as “rotating,” and I later learned that “rotate” referred to moving (or rotating) the clothes from one station to the next—stations meaning from the basket to the washer, from the washer to the dryer, and from the dryer to the couch (where the clothes quickly built up into a small mountain until someone took the entire day to fold them and put them away).

Anyway, I had heard my mother yell “rotate” so often that somewhere along the line I began to associate “rotate” with laundry until the two were interchangeable. It’s not that I would laundry my joints if they were sore, but you get the gist.

It then occurred to me that not everyone had a Red Bag of Courage for ballgames, road trips, and everything in between. The Red Bag of Courage was just a simple red bag that my mom used as a go-bag. Whenever we’d go somewhere, she’d say, “Make sure someone grabs the Red Bag of Courage.” It was such a staple in our family, I just assumed every mother had their own Red Bag of Courage, but now that I had learned about differing word associations, I started questioning everything.

Do I say let's eat dinner or supper? 
Is pronounced caramel or caramel? 
Can I keep saying awl or do I really have to say oil? 
Crayon or crown?
Skunk or polecat? (this is a real thing, look it up)
Sled or toboggan? Beanie or toboggan? (toboggan is wrong on both accounts)
Goobers or peanuts?
Knife or Arkansas toothpick?
Shopping cart or buggy?
Left Twix or right Twix? (left Twix of course!)
Am I craving somethin' or do I have a hankerin'?
Does my mother really mean it when she says "Bless your heart" or is that a dig?

And the questioning went on and on and on, and I learned that broadening the scope of your association can be a helpful skill to have, especially with word games.

Creators of crossword puzzles, for example, challenge your ability to view a clue from as many different associations as possible. If you’re too entrenched in your own association for a word or phrase, you’ll never be able to solve all of the clues and complete the puzzle, so you have to be able to consider every word or phrase with meanings that are different from what you’re familiar with. That’s the fun of it.

This skill isn’t just applicable to crossword puzzles either, but to life as well. We often approach a problem with our own preconceived ideas for how to solve it, but in doing so, we leave behind a host of other solutions—of which there are usually various better options. Being able to step away from your own solution-associations allows you to view all of the possibilities more clearly and choose more wisely.

So do those crossword puzzles and play those word games. Challenge yourself to widen your word association, for in doing so, you will approach the world through a less narrow-minded lens and begin seeing patterns all around you that you previously overlooked.

And you’ll even be able to call things by their proper names (instead of calling a sled something stupid, like “toboggan”).

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some rotating to do.

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