Dear Editor,
I am not an educator by profession but I can remember from the time I went to Sunday school and had to recite memory verses and recitations, on occasions my father would test me to see if I knew my piece. From then already I knew the meaning of the word "intonation". He would ask me if I knew the meaning of certain words in the recitation and we would look them up together in the dictionary and he would make me read the meaning. You should not speak about things you do not know anything about.
As I grew older, he always insisted that I look up strange or difficult words. That is why I thought of the word symbiosis. If I happened to ask him the meaning of a word, I would get that well-known look, meaning, "you know what you have to do". One day when I dared ask him why he always insisted that I make use of the dictionary, he took the dictionary sat me down next to him and said, “If you ask me the meaning of a word and I tell you this is what you will miss by not consulting the dictionary.
”You probably will not get the right pronunciation of the word from me (phonetics). I might not be able to explain you completely because many words have several meanings just as several words are written differently but sound the same (hear, here, hair, hare). Along with that, while leafing through the dictionary, you will come across some words that you did not even know existed.
I do not have dictionaries in my car and I rarely use my phone to Google words at home. One would think that the word "symbiosis" is not an everyday word, how could I have recognized that word, and I would be the first to agree. The truth about that is that after looking up a word in the dictionary the thought came to me to check the meaning of Simmons.
I could not find the meaning and wondered if the original word could have been symmons. That also was not the case, but I came across "symbiosis" among other words and checked out the meaning. Googling is the same. One only sees one word at a time, whereas there are approximately ten words to every page in the dictionary.
Russell A. Simmons
