K is for Knickknack

I can’t ever see or hear the word knickknack without thinking of my mother.

I was, as I’m sure no one who’s read here for any length of time will be surprised to hear, a pestilentially curious child. 

         “What is that?” 

         “What makes that work like that?” 

         “What does that word mean?”

Mom bore this with fortitude for several years but somewhere around the time I turned 7, she informed me that I needed to learn to look these things up for myself. Curiosity was good but just asking other people was lazy. Here’s the dictionary and how it works - Have at it, child!

But of course, I was both lazy and a child.

A voracious reader… but lazy - and a child.

~one memorable evening, circa mid-1960's~

“Mom, what’s a… baah… baow… um….b-a-u-b-l-e?”

“Honey, I told you to stop asking me and look things up yourself.”

         uh-oh.

         busted.

         quick! fib!

“I tried but I didn’t understand what it said.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!”

Pretty sure she had caught me out, she stepped briskly into the room, fully prepared to score a parental point. She grabbed the 1936 Webster’s International from the shelf, flipped to the “B”s, and found the word.

“Baw-ble: noun…” she declaimed…, then paused ever-so-briefly, a funny look passing over her face, before concluding dramatically… “a knickknack, gewgaw, gimcrack.” 

With a definitive snap, she shut the book, looked at me, and said, “I really don’t see how they could have been any clearer than that.”

She made it almost a full two seconds before bursting into a fit of giggles.

(She loved the absurd, did my mom.)

So, to this day, whenever I hear the word “knickknack”, I inevitably mentally append, “gewgaw, gimcrack”… and think of my mom.

And smile.