obnoxious & lugubrious
I was reading something where the writer used the word noxious. I knew what it meant but it made me wonder how noxious and obnoxious are different. The dictionary informed me I’ve been wrong for more than 50 years about this word I remember family, friends, and teachers using to describe me at times.
If they were using the word correctly, I was not as I thought, just a little loud and annoying at times. Apparently, I was ‘extremely unpleasant.’1
So, that’s a little disappointing.
(The picture above is the comment section of my 6th grade report card. I’d like to think the teacher meant what she wrote and thought I could do even better in allocating my energy. But, given the sentence that followed, I think she meant to write “in inappropriate ways.”2 I was 11 but my challenge of misplaced energy started much earlier.3)
Somewhere else…
Preet Bharara, a former US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, once talked on his wonderful podcast with the well-known journalist Kara Swisher. A little over 20 minutes in…
Kara: I don’t use Facebook that much … I don’t use it because I don’t like the product. I think it’s lugubrious and big and bloated and stuff like that.
Preet: What does lugubrious mean?
Kara: Just slow-moving. I don’t find any use to it.
Preet: I was asking for a friend.
For some reason, I checked the dictionary…
A nice reminder of our shared humanity and that words can mean different things to different people regardless of what the dictionary reports.
For me, it’s the ‘extremely’ of the ‘extremely unpleasant’ that makes describing someone as ‘obnoxious’ to be a bit of an exaggeration.
But as long as the ‘unpleasant’ isn’t the ‘revulsion’ piece of the definition, I can see how for some people, someone who’s a little loud and annoying might in certain circumstances, rise to being obnoxious.
A reader pointed out to me “She probably meant she wanted you to do more of what you were already doing, because you could read into it that way, lol.” I was blown away. I never saw that possibility. My teacher could have been 212ing me. A cool little lesson in perception.
A teacher’s note on the back of my kindergarten report card (I was 5)…
A year later (grade 1)…
And I’m still working on all of it.