Edamame, By Brian37 (AKA Brian James Rational Poet on FB/META and @Brianrrs37 on Twitter X)

When I was a little kid
This is what my parents did
When I didn’t know
How to spell a word

And for spelling
I was no good
“Look it up
In the dictionary”

Was a torture
A punishment
As bad as bamboo
Slivers under my fingernails

It would make me scream
It would make me
Have bad dreams
What did I ever do to them?

But now Google is my friend
Far easier to use
And comprehend
Now I fear no word when first heard

I don’t have to be perfect
I can spell it really bad
Google gives me suggestions
So I don’t stay mad

So today in a space
Into my life it made pace
Edamame entered my ear
I had to find it’s place

Soybeans boiled
In their pods
Fancy sounding name
Didn’t intimidate me at all

Neither does a bramble
Nor a preamble
Nor anthropomorphism
My brain has no more spasms

I know this may sound banal
But my parents were really anal
I never put my feet on an ottoman
My empire was a mere foot stool.

So now I know what edamame are
That dictionary never got me far
But by the grace of Google and Simone
I just enter what I don’t know into the search bar.
(end)

Growing up words that sounded fancy to me, or long words with many syllables, would intimidate me. If it sounded foreign it would intimidate me. I was a horrible speller, still am today. But when I was a kid the most dreaded thing I could hear from my parents or a teacher was “look it up in the dictionary”. I fucking hated that. It didn’t encourage me, it made me feel stupid, unworthy. It made me hate reading.

I struggled through school. But when spellcheck first hit, all it did was underline a misspelled word. But being in college at the time that frustration forced me to either look it up, or have someone proofread my paper.

Now today, Google is very forgiving with bad spelling and if you come close google will suggest “did you mean” and give you a correct spelling, and when you click on that, it gives you a definition, in layperson’s terms. So now, I am never intimidated by any word anyone uses now.

Simone taught me a new word I heard for the first time today “edamame” and now I know that is a Japanese soybean/dish.

All the other words like bramble, and banal, and ottoman and anthropomorphism were words, when I was a kid would have shut down my brain and made me feel dumb and stupid.