Saucy Writing Prompt: Dictionary and Pest

Each episode of the Saucy Wenches Podcast includes a two-word writing prompt. These prompts are intended to spur creative writing, by using the prompt words in a short story. I’ve never taken part in the writing exercise, although I’m one of the podcast’s most loyal listeners. (I’ve even been a guest!) However, I’ve resolved to start doing the prompt, to try to jumpstart my own creative muse. Herewith, my contribution for the January prompt, “dictionary” and “pest.”

Tom strode briskly from the dining room to his study. As he walked from one room to the other, he sighed with exasperation. "Mother, I really don’t understand why you do this all the time. Why can’t we have a talk, just once, as equals, without you sending me to the dictionary to look up some word I’ve never heard of?"

The question was rhetorical, of course: Mother never argued. She’d already told Tom the answer to that question several years ago. Just because no one else’s vocabulary–she called it "lexicon"–was as good as hers, was no reason for her to use what she called "inferior words." Besides, as she reminded him almost daily, they weren’t equals.

And using the computer to look up the word was simply not going to suffice. No: Tom had to go to the huge Merriam-Webster New International Dictionary, 10th Edition–made from the byproducts of dead trees, no less!

In the study, he walked to the table upon which sat the dictionary, always open to the approximate center of the of the book. He unlatched the Plexiglas cover and lifted it up. As it rotated on its hinges, it levered the dictionary so it was tilted slightly toward Tom.

Carefully, almost reverently, he turned the pages back towards the front. "G…g-a-…here it is." He laughed out loud, a short, barking chuckle that left a grin on his face. Just as carefully as he had started, he turned the pages back to the middle of the book, then closed and latched the cover.

Still grinning, he walked back to the dining room. He took his seat opposite Mother. "You know, for an all-knowing computer that not only steers this yacht through intergalactic spacetime, but goads me into learning a language that has been mostly dead for centuries, you’re really not a gadfly. Sounds like a common household pest. No, you’re more than that, Mother. You’re a royal pain in the ass."

Tagged as: Saucy Wenches, writing prompt