The stool was a bit too high, the headphones were a bit too big, and the volume was a bit too loud. The host turned to me and said, “Okay, on in 30. We’ll have about three minutes. Are you ready?”
“You bet.”
“Just be yourself, this’ll be great.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, mentally reviewing some of the noteworthy words we had just entered into that year’s update of the Collegiate Dictionary— “SARS,” “convergence,” “gastric bypass,” “blog,” “pop-up,” “psyops.”
When the radio station came back from commercial, the host turned to his mic, introduced me as an editor from Merriam-Webster, and began our conversation on important new words with, “I’m looking at your list of new entries for this edition, and the one that really caught my eye was ‘bikini wax’!”
The co-hostess piped up. “Did you have to do field research on this? I mean, did you all go out and get bikini waxes?!”
“Now THAT is job dedication!” the host hee-hawed.
In the microsecond before my brain cobbled together a vaguely coherent reply and sent it down the answer-chute, where it would fall out of my already-open mouth, I thought, “No wonder no one else volunteers to talk to the public.” Continue reading
harm·less drudg·ery 