Nope, not the Judy Blume story which is a great one, by the way.  Actually, I wish I were talking about the book, but hey if you can’t laugh at yourself…  

A couple of years ago, I was sitting on my chaise reading a book and my husband was at his computer. Our oldest came in and I forget the exact conversation, but my youngest didn’t believe something my oldest had told him. The story was really bad and not at all believable. Of course, that could be because the oldest was grinning ear to ear.

I looked up from my book and said, “Mase you have really got to get better at “superfudge”.”

I got dead silence and two wide-eyed stares.

After several moments, my husband finally blinked and said, “What?”

I kind of sighed thinking, geez, apparently we need a vocabulary lesson. So I explained,  “You know….”superfudge.” It means deception. S-U-B-T-E-R-F-U-G-E (I actually spelled it out for them.)”

Again I got dead silence then both of them laughed.

“What?” I said.  “It really is a word. I can’t believe the two of you have never heard it.”

I got yet another round of laughter then my husband said, “It’s sub-ter-foo-juh.”

“What?”

“That is how you say subterfuge.” My youngest, who’d been listening in his room, came in and explained through his laughter.

For years my brain read the word as superfudge.  Oh I spelled it right when I used it I knew exactly what it meant, but I had never heard that word spoken aloud and my brain supplied my own pronunciation. To this day every time I do something silly my youngest looks at me and shakes his head and with a big smile says, “Superfudge, mom.”

The reason I told this story is because today I wrote the word beautific and my spell check said beatific.  I was like, “Um, no! I mean beautific.”  But for the sake of argument, I looked it up and low and behold I meant beatific.  The longer I write the more I wonder if I will ever truly have a good command of the English language. I swear I have a tremendous amount of respect for people who learn English as a second language. Bless you people, you are amazing! My hats off to you.