Holidays and Celebrations: Honoring Our Fathers

According to one of my online friends, Fathers Day is celebrated in their country on March 19, 2017.  (Source.)  In the USA, the day we take to honor fathers is every 3^rd Sunday in June.

Picked up a Reader’s Digest. Haven’t browsed through this publication in ages. Found an October 2015 issue in a magazine bucket.

What was the first thing to read? The Quotable Quotes , of course! Who doesn’t love reading quotes?

Never served in the military, however, several members of my family and many of my friends have served. So the next section, perusing the magazine from back to front, was Humor in Uniform . Good for a few laughs.

Third stop? My favorite part of Reader’s Digest. Word Power.

There were 13 words. Only knew two of them. So 11 new words have been added to my vocabulary.

As for the 2 words I did know?

One of them, if my memory recall is correct, was learned during one of my high school English classes. The word was “assiduously”, meaning “with careful attention”.

The other word brought back a wonderful childhood memory. Only heard this word used by a person once. It was while watching an episode of “ Leave It to Beaver ”, an old TV series about a “typical” All-American family, the Cleaver family. The show mainly focused on the youngest child, nicknamed “Beaver” and the valuable life lessons he was always having to learn. The vocabulary word that brought back the childhood memory was used by Mr. Ward Cleaver, the Beaver’s dad. He was a man known for his sensibility, his gentlemanly behavior and good manners; who never lost his temper. Except this one time. When he did, he used the word in making a heated statement to express his frustration at trying to reason with an unreasonable person.

The word was “perspicacity”.

In fact, Mr. Cleaver was so fed up with the unfruitful interaction between him and the other person, that he added an adjective and said that the man had “limited perspicacity”.

Perspicacity means “mental acuteness”.

Really liked the character Ward Cleaver, played by actor, Hugh Beaumont. This TV dad reminded me a lot of my real dad. My late father rarely lost his temper but when he needed to express himself firmly, he was very adept at picking the right words to say.  🙂

World’s best dad” Image Credit: glitter-graphics.com