Welsh Poets and French Food

Key word:  eisteddfod

About 1,000 words or 2 pages

It’s good to be put in your place every now and then, and by that I mean being cut down to size by those more clever than you—whether at work or at home.   Here are a couple of glaring examples from yours truly to help you make it through your day.

First, a tale from Toastmasters.  This is that famous group to help one sharpen public speaking skills.  It’s a great program especially for executives, and we had a chapter which met at our office every week or so with about 20 of us in the group.  In the usual program, Toastmasters has a “word of the day” where an individual is assigned to bring a word to the meeting that all then try to use in their impromptu one-minute speeches.  I watched as the usual suspect words were brought in by my peers:  inculcates and prevaricates and bloviates and so on.   My turn came for word of the day and I offered up raison d’être -- a bit of a show off word, but still useful as “reason for being.”

One of my colleagues, ever fast on her feet, handled this word with alacrity during her minute:  “my mother, being of French extraction, was a great cook; I remember the mouth-watering aromas of the kitchen, for she truly made the best raison d’être anyone has ever had.”   She had no clue what the word meant, but she wasn’t even flustered and fielded it well.  In fact, she got laughter and applause.  Next time, I would have to come up with a better word. 

And it happened.  I was flipping through a concise version of the end-all-be-all of dictionaries, the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) to ready myself for the next word of the day opportunity.   There it was:  eisteddfod.  I said it out loud, ees-ted-fod, which means, of course, a congregation of Welsh poets.  Nothing could beat this.  I envisioned cheers, confetti, the medal around my neck:  yes, all the accolades of word-of-the-day stardom were to be mine. 

And all was as it should have been--for a while.  All were impressed with my great word, and no one could quite fit it successfully in a sentence off the cuff.   It was an afternoon triumphant, and then came an office reception that evening.  Many of my Toastmaster colleagues were there.  And so too was the visiting Consul General from the UK.   Our office even arranged for a picture of the Queen and a welcome “HM Consul So-and-So” sign at the entrance. 

We were ready.  It was my duty as a good executive to make small talk with the diplomat.  After finding out he had studied at fine universities like Oxford and the Sorbonne, I asked him if he’d been on any interesting trips lately.  He said he’d recently been to Wales.

Wales!  He didn’t just say Wales, did he?   My friends, the moment was mine.  I perked up, looked about, and came in for the kill, “Ah, Wales.  Did you happen upon any, uh-hum, ees-ted-fods?”   I asked, delicately letting the word flow from my lips like silk on a breeze.  Conversations stopped, Toastmasters in the crowd turned in amazement.  Boy howdy, he’s done the impossible, they thought. 

And then, Her Majesty’s Consul looked at me, and it was a moment, no, a year, before he spoke, “My dear man, the word is eye-sted-fud.”   I did not speak.  In fact, I was now exactly one half the height I was a moment before.  My choices seemed to be to make haste to Wales, find an eisteddfod, and self-immolate before them, or to quietly sneak out of the building, head home and dismember the OED. 

Now to the home front.  My daughter, filling out college applications, said she planned to self-designate as American Indian hoping to improve her odds of getting into some prestigious university.  She had heard the family story of Great-great-grandmother Matilda who was full-blooded Cherokee and married my great-great-grandfather, just off the boat from Ireland.  This is why my grandmother and my Aunt Wylene both had high cheek bones and red hair, of course.  So, I started doing the math on what the fraction needed to be to claim this ancestry and promote my child to some great school (Hmmm…I envisioned her at Oxford or the Sorbonne, so she could learn to do battle with consuls, but no, I was over that incident). 

My wife scoffed at this whole thing.  First, we shouldn’t be claiming something just for selfish gain, and secondly, didn’t we know that half the stories of Cherokee lineage turn out all confused.   No way, I said.  This has been passed down to me painstakingly through the generations.  My son even tans oh so easily and we were all quite at home in the woods.  Something in the cell memory, I explained to my wife.   Why don’t we leave it all up to science, she suggested.  So we got the DNA test.  

In no time, I sealed up the tube of spittle, and off to the ancestry lab it went.   A few weeks went by, and my daughter, now close to an Indian princess for sure, was busy putting the final touches on the college application essays and the like.  It looked very promising.  Then the mail arrived.  Well, email actually, to my wife’s account.

“Gather round, and let me announce the results of the great heritage test,” she said, but she sported this wicked smile.   “Let’s see,” she began, “mostly English with a good bit Irish and some Welsh even [no comment], and the percentage you thought to be American Indian turns out to be from—well, from Senegal.”  I was incredulous.  Senegal?

                “Oh, maybe that explains why we all took French,” said the daughter.  I shrugged and went off.  To eat some raison d’être.     

©Copyright 2018 by JP Harrison.  All rights reserved.