I was very young when the original Star Trek series was on. It took many years for me to extract the words from live long and prosper. I thought it was just a saying that was as meaningless as a lot of other sayings that I heard up to that point. So many things sounded like thribelty pop and thrump the splister back then. Just crap people would say and if you'd ask about certain sayings, they usually wouldn't know what they meant. If lick the rim and suck the jelly was an ancient greeting, a lot of people would still be saying it today without knowing what it means.

Well, at least live long and prosper made sense and required no decoding once I extracted it from the place in my brain for sayings and actually listened to the words. I know what live long means. That's easy. And prosper is simple once you learn that word in school.

Like a lot of other kids, I said Star Track for a certain number of years because I never heard of the word trek. After finally learning the word in school, I quickly adjusted my pronunciation. I did that for other words and sayings too. For example, I stopped saying wheel barrel at one point in school and finally switched to wheelbarrow. Since that time, I've tried not to have lazy ears (saying what everybody else is saying or what they seem to be saying). If I'm not sure, I look it up.

It's strange when I see adults who keep pronouncing words as if they were still lazy-eared children. For example, they'll say hyth instead of height (as if they are mixing height with width).

Random Terrain

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