Slight Confusion

    I get alpine and lupine mixed up.  My problem is not with alpine:  I read Heidi and all the Heidi sequels enough times to get the association with the Alps.  My problem is in my first reaction to lupine:  I think of it as a type of reclining Alps.  (as if the Alps could lie down or flatten out into a meadow!)  Lupine is too-nice-a-sounding word to have anything to do with ravenous wolves.  The image of a wildflower-studded meadow straight from The Sound of Music persists.

    Of course, alpine/lupine is not the only paired confusion from which I suffer.  Another Alps-related set of terms (as in loosely connected to the Alps in the form of the Alps being in a part of the German-speaking world) dates back to 1976 when I lived in Freiburg, Germany for six months.  At this very moment, the German for knife and fork elude me.  I would get the two words mixed up even though they do not sound the same at all.  Oh!  Now I have it:  Gabel (fork) und Messer (knife),  I think.  The odd thing is that the German language confusion followed some circuitous path in my brain right into English.  To this day, when confronted with a knife and a fork, I have sort it out in my mind which is which.

    While I’m into this Dictionary.com-inspired confession, I might as well admit my problem with spoonerisms as well.  I even wrote a linguistics paper about it in graduate school (spoonerisms, not my personal problem with them).  The rule seems to be this:  say it wrong once, and the spoonerism will forever stick.  As a freshman in college, I referred to a wall hanging as a hall wanging, and to this day, I have to stop and consider before I know which one is right.  The same goes for my mom’s old saying, which I cannot remember right now.

    That is a little scary when I can’t remember what confuses me.  But a gruesome image has just saved the day for my lupine/alpine problem:  scary cartoon wolves chasing Julie Andrews across the meadow.