Friday, January 04, 2008

The Best Advice I Ever Got

"Look It Up" - my parents

That's what they told me every time I asked them what a word meant or how to spell it. I now realize that they did this because I was asking them questions they didn't know the answers to, but their guidance toward the dictionary was the first building block in my path towards superior intelligence.
It's no secret that I think I'm smarter than everyone but most of you don't realize that being this smart takes a lot of hard work.
While most of you might see a unique word in a newspaper article and try to figure it out in context or just skip it, I take the time to look it up and find out what it means, then use it in a sentence so it becomes my own.
My vocabulary idol, Walt "Clyde" Frazier does this too, which he says often leads to his somewhat unconvential, though always technically correct, uses of a word.
Clyde once called Marcus Camby a "ubiquitous kleptomaniac." One day I aspire to achieve that level of greatness.
In "The Program," Darnell (Omar) gets Halle Berry to go out with him by saying "I no longer wish to be cast in a pejorative light so I've dedicated myself to achieving on a level more commensurate with my abilities."
Now that we are in the age of the internet, with all the world's knowledge at my fingertips, I'm constantly looking stuff up, and becoming even smarter than I already am.
And if that's a scary thought, blame my parents, they started it.

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