Word of the Day -- Antediluvian

Antediluvian -- It literally means "before the flood".  The dictionary defines it is meaning a time before the biblical flood in both the Christian Bible and Hebrew Torah.  Actually would be a pretty cool word for a name or town in an adventure, in my opinion.  It can also be loosely used to refer to any ancient time or epoch.  Like most of our borrowed Latin words, you can break it down into its parts and start to see how it makes sense.  The prefix "ante" means before, such as in antechamber, anteroom, or more popularly, ante as in poker, the chip you put in before the cards are dealt.  "Diluvian" is a little trickier because the spelling is different, but it isn't too hard to see how diluvian is associated with deluge, which is just another word for downpour or flood.  So there you have it, in a nutshell, antediluvian.  A huge word broken down into it's respective parts and thereby made easily identifiable.  Right?

Well, perhaps.  And perhaps not.  The reason I point all this out is because this word has special meaning to me.  Not for any religious reason, or because I won a spelling bee with it.  No, it's because it was the word that led me to believe my father was the smartest guy on the planet.  Like any good nerd, I was 9 and sitting on the toilet and reading the dictionary (I know I'm not the only one that does that).  I was reading through the "A" words when I came across this word I couldn't even pronounce, much less know what it meant.   But I read it and after I got out of the bathroom, I thought I'd go quiz my dad.  He had always been a lover of words and I figured I had him beat with this one.

I started with a couple easy ones, aardvark and antonym, which of course he knew.  Then I waited for my big moment and said: "Yeah, you're pretty smart, but how about antediluvian?"  I'm not sure I was even able to properly pronounce it.  But without nary a break in stride, he replied: "Oh yeah, that means before the flood".  I was dumbfounded.  Here I found the toughest word I could imagine at the time, and he rattled it off without really even thinking.  It was then that I decided he was the smartest person in the world.  Now, maybe he is or maybe he isn't, but for a kid of 9, that's a great thing to believe.  We should all be so lucky to believe that about a parent.

And for the record, I still do.