My parents could define almost any word because they had studied Latin in high school. Back in the ‘60s, on our way to the Bronx, four of the seven kids in my family sat on the back seat of the family station wagon, awkwardly holding my dad’s gigantic, hard-covered, unabridged Webster’s Dictionary. We took turns flipping through to find “big” words that would stump Mom and Dad.
Nobody wore seatbelts back then, so we switched seats. It was easier to move our skinny bottoms than to move Mr. Webster. Without exception, Mom and Dad came up with a correct definition and we were amazed.
