When I was in the 10th grade, my folks sent me
off to a quaint thing called the Presbyterian Guidance Center.
Now you’re thinking I was some kind of “juvenile delinquent,” aren’t you.
You see 20th Century protestant inquisitors
looking like they’ve overdosed on quinces, don’t you.
But that was not it at all.
The PRC’s were actually places where 10th-graders
worked through batteries of serious psychological tests aimed at determining one’s
likely vocations.
One reason I qualified for this opportunity is that I was a
licensed amateur radio operator –what passed for “geek” in the 50s. I and a
small cabal of my school mates did short-wave radio as a hobby, a hobby that
still thrives and is one of the nation’s primary backups for communication during
disasters like hurricanes, marathons, and urban parades.
The logical assumption may have been made – I always had my
suspicions – that some adults might have seen my hobby as a front for
clandestine black ops training of some sort.
I mean -- in The Day there was the Red Threat, you know. Senator
Joseph McCarthy reminded us almost daily that there were Commies under every
other rock (not counting the one he had come out from under, of course.) And it might have made sense for some to
assume that Das Hitlerjugend could clandestinely have lived on as teenage ham
radio operators, and a Boy Scout to boot --
kids who knew Morse code!
But no, the sponsors of the Guidance Centers were Southern
Presbyterians – the Presbyterian Church in the United States, which would merge
in the 80s with the PCUSA to form the national denomination we know today. But
in the 50s some saw the PCUS as a refuge for Confederate remnants of
Presbyterians. And living in Richmond, Virginia didn’t help assuage that
notion.
But those were just whispers in dark corners. It was a great church to grow up in , and the
Guidance Centers did a lot for me, to wit:
In groups of five or six, we went through two consecutive Saturdays
of psychological tests in the psychology departments of either Hampden-Sydney
or Mary Baldwin Colleges – brother and sister institutions under the tentative
but vigilant auspices of the PCUS. (Despite the religious connection, of
course, if you visited either campus you learned quickly how -- well -- theoretical that concept was).
I was fascinated by the testing, how the questions were
asked and then asked 17 questions later in a different way (to see if you were
paying attention). The cool part came at the end when we each got to sit with
one of the psych professors at the college where we were tested, and the
professor would explain the results of two full days of testing in detail, The conclusion
listed a number of professions or occupations that made sense as a result of
the testing.
If ax-murderer were one of the results, they would come and
take you away, of course, for some remedial Southern Presbyterianism.
But that did not happen with us.
Mine ended up hitting the nail on the head. One of the
occupational segments my tests pointed to was “journalist and writer.” And
that’s just about exactly what happened.
Only problem was that my vocabulary scores showed up at an
8th grade level. I clearly needed to do some work on improving
my vocabulary. So I started what has become a lifelong study of words…and a lot
of reading.
When I came across a word that puzzled me, I wrote it down
in a notebook. Later I looked it up in the dictionary. But first I tried to
discern -- from its context and how it sounded -- what it meant.
The reward was that by the time I enrolled as a freshman at
Hampden-Sydney College, I was put through the same battery of tests. And this
time my vocabulary had improved to the level of a college senior.
Not one to rest on laurels, though, I kept going with word
study. And when I learned Latin and Greek etymology – the study of the origins
of words – I got rather sophisticated with the word-learning thing.
As I've read I’ve continued to write down words I had
questions about or did not recognize .
I do not do this for every word I fuzz up on, but for the
few that I do, the procedure is the same as it’s always been. I write the word,
think about its possible origins, consider the context and guess what it means.
Sometimes I’m right, sometimes not. And I check my thoughts with a good
dictionary.
Just for fun, here are two extreme examples showing how that’s
worked:
TRICOTEUSES –
Hair-suckers? Context and from thrix,
Greek for hair?
Nope – tricoteuses were women who sat and knitted…preferably
during public executions. The term originated during the French Revolution.
MYRMIDON – Weird
sentinels who “murmured” amongst themselves.
Wrong again – myrmidons originated as names for those who
followed Achilles in the Trojan War. By extension, they were “loyal followers,”
[Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate].
(For what it’s worth,
I still like my original thoughts about tricoteuses and myrmidons – They’re out
there, you know.)
