My daughter is precocious
My daughter is precocious. I’m not entirely sure what that word, “precocious,” actually means, but I feel comfortable using it to describe my daughter. In this age of Google and Wikipedia I could easily look up the word, but I won’t. I’m too lazy. I’ve got a real good slouch going in this chair right now and wouldn’t want to mess that up.
There are certainly words I would never use to describe my child and probably not anyone else’s child. Brittle comes to mind. I would never describe my daughter as brittle. That word calls to mind two things. She’s either incredibly stiff and also breakable, or has been sitting in a holiday-themed tin on top of grandpa’s fridge for way too long and gets stuck in your teeth. Either way, that’s not what my daughter is all about.
Likewise I wouldn’t describe her as granular. She has little to nothing to do with sand, salt or sugar in her day-to-day and the word really just wouldn’t apply.
I might describe her as robust. At times she certainly is. But she’s not barrel chested, doesn’t wear lumberjack plaid shirts, and has a relatively high pitched, soft voice. All in all, she’s not very robust.
I’ll stick with precocious because I’m really not entirely sure what it means. I think it’s one of those words that sounds fancy and interesting, but probably a great many people don’t actually know what it means. I think that applies to my little girl. She can be fancy and interesting, and few people (Leona and I included) can figure her out with any regularity. Some nights she screams herself to sleep. Last night she wanted me to hold her and sing her to sleep.
Precocious is a word that you need to be a little bit careful with when you handle, clearly enunciating the individual syllables. You have to be careful with Miss Cupcake too, or she’ll yell at you and maybe even smack you. You tend to admire someone who drops a word like “precocious” at a dinner party; you admire their ability to use it in a sentence! I admire my daughter and her abilities.
So I’ll keep telling people that my daughter is precocious because I have a delicate child, one with great abilities but also a fickleness about her. I have a child that is difficult to understand, but never ceases to impress me. And I’m okay with that.
