I love words. I love how you can get into serious internet debates over their proper spelling (“rigamarole” or “rigmarole”?) I love how there is a word for almost everything, and I love how when you discover just what that word is you suddenly realize that you can’t possibly be the first person to feel the way that you do, which sometimes can be very comforting. (Take schadenfreude, for example. The fact that there is already a word for “unholy glee felt at another’s misfortune” makes me feel somewhat like less of a jerk when I chortle gleefully at the sight of shivering Phoenicians wearing nothing but shorts, sandals, and shocked expressions. Somewhat.)
Sometimes, though, the opposite happens: words fail me, and it seems that there really isn’t the right word for what I’m going through; this, in turn, makes me feel terribly alone in the world. At least, it does until the right word reveals itself once more. That’s what happened to me recently, when I was desperate to find a word that describes a person who is constantly losing their shoes.
Luckily, just that day my absolute favorite word website, AWAD (A Word A Day), featured the word “discalced,” which means “to go barefoot.” A ha! I thought. If the word for going without shoes is discalced, then the word for having lost your shoes must be “miscalced.” And therefore, it only follows that the word for someone who constantly loses their shoes must be . . . Clementine.
She has always been like this—her nickname as a baby was “Shoeless Joe.” You know that Hemingway short short story—“For sale: baby shoes. Never used.”? Change “shoes” to “shoe” and that story could have been written about her—we had such a large collection of single baby shoes at our house that people always seemed surprised to find out that we didn’t have a one-legged baby to go with them. If anything, as she has gotten older her propensity to miscalce every pair of shoes she owns has just gotten worse—in fact, losing shoes has become such an accepted part of her daily routine that she doesn’t even bother to look for the missing pairs any more; she just accepts it as the “will of the Universe.”
I, on the other hand—the person who is tasked with buying all of these shoes—have not.
For example, the other day she lost a pair of dress shoes while they were still in the box. When I insisted that she go back into her room and look for them a little bit harder, she responded with “What’s the point? They’re gone.”
“Gone?” I replied, aghast. “What do you mean gone? I just bought them yesterday.”
“I dunno,” she replied.
“Well, did you wear them anywhere?”
“No.”
“Did you take them out of the box?”
“No.”
“Did you put them away?” (Here her reply was unintelligible, thanks to the whoops of laughter coming from my husband and myself at the thought of Clementine ever putting anything away.) After I wiped my streaming eyes I asked her again. “No, seriously, did you put them—snort, giggle—away?”
“No,” she said coldly.
And that was that. They were gone. For now, at least. Because that’s the thing with her missing shoes—I’ve realized that they have a tendency to show up just when she outgrows them.
And then we give them to Clyde.
Somehow, just picturing the look on Clementine’s face as she watches her little brother walk around in her missing high heel lace-up Oxfords is all the schadenfreude I need.