In which our intrepid hero misses an important clue…
When I was a kid, like a lot of kids who read a ton of books, I had a reading vocabulary that was much bigger than my speaking vocabulary. One word that I knew the meaning of was French in origin: hors d’oeuvres. In my mind, I pronounced this word something like “whores davores.” I knew the word meant something like appetizers. There was another word that meant basically the same thing: “orderves.” I don’t even know how many years passed before I finally realized that “orderves” and “hors d’oeuvres” were actually not synonyms but the same damn word.
