“Look it up,” he said.

Holy shit, that bothered me. I mean, my vocabulary’s decent...isn’t it? And his vocabulary? He seems to be at war with the English language (along with almost everything and everyone else)...so when he tells us to look something up, it’s like that lesson from the village idiot that my father always said would come.

So I tried to look it up, but I’d never heard it before--it didn’t even sound familiar--so how was I going to spell it? And the way he pronounced it, I thought…hmm…ballet term? I mean, we’ve seen this guy spin and spin and spin and he’s often looked unbalanced while doing it, so maybe it’s related to a pirouette. Nope.

Then I thought “perforation.” It kinda fit. I mean, he said he was just getting into it and God knows, he’s torn up enough shit lately. So maybe he'd just slaughtered yet another word, slaughtered yet one more thing. So that’s easy enough, case closed. But…if it was that easy, why would he have to advise us to look it up? No, it couldn’t be that.

Then I started just browsing through the P’s and I saw it. “Peroration.” It means, according to Dictionary.com, “to conclude a speech with a formal recapitulation." Whew. Now I get it. He was about to shut up. That it could only be permanent, that it would only be permanent.

But you know, how does he know what “peroration” means and how to use it? Better yet, how did he pull off pronouncing it? Was it a word-for-the-day on one of those nifty desk calendars? No--that seems a bit highfalutin for him. Was it in that increase-your-vocabulary feature in Reader’s Digest? No--they say he doesn’t read much so I think when he does read, he’s got to make it count--y'know, with stuff like boxscores and comics.

So when he uses a word like that, where does it come from? I have to think it's something he heard The Dark Prince say….and he asked him what it meant…and then The DP challenged him, dared him to use the word, promising him something special, like, um, maybe he wouldn't shoot anyone for a while. So Dubya learned a new word. And then he used it. And then he sat up on his hind legs and got his treat.