On the other hand, exceptional vocabulary comprehension is not yet within the grasp of her exceptional vocabulary comprehension; Ruthie, in this One Big Happy strip that came up in my comics feed recently, does indeed know a lot of words, just not some of the 4- and 5-syllable killer items:
But you can bet that if we had the next few panels, we would see Ruthie quizzing her mother on those 2-dollar words — though by now they’re probably 10-dollar words — and incorporating them into her exceptional vocabulary, so that she can show them off.
From GDoS on two-dollar words:
(US) any language considered ‘difficult’ or ‘intellectual’, most likely by a speaker who claims to despise such locutions [with cites from 1929 on]
Leave a Reply