Cogent

My favorite high school English teacher used to say words to us that were not part of standard vernacular, because he actually wanted us to learn something. He would then exclaim, "look it up!" if we didn't know what it meant. He expected us all to have our own dictionaries in class every day, and we did. If someone forgot their dictionary and he told that person to "look it up!" that person would jump out of their seat, go to the back of the class, and look up the word in the mammothly unabridged dictionary that sat on a shelf all of its own.

My favoritest word that he taught us was "cogent". Whenever I hear that word I am instantly reminded of him. Here are a few memories of him that surface each time I encounter cogent:

a) He once tried to accuse me without accusing me of submitting a paper written by someone else because I used the word "atribute" (yes, misspelling of "attribute"). He didn't think I had any sort of extended vocabulary, so he thought that I had bought a paper from someone else and submitted it as my own work. He was so wrong. I was a computer nerd, and used the command "attrib" in DOS, so I happened to have "attribute" in my working vocabulary.

b) My sophomore year I had a dream about him having sex with me on the floor. I was on the bottom, and he was on top, thrusting into me as he read Shakespeare out loud. I couldn't look him in the eye for two weeks after that, and I look everyone in the eye (I think it's rude not to...).

c) He taught us the expression "SOL", but he told us it meant "Sorry Out of Luck" instead of "Shit Out of Luck".

d) He regularly let us into the teacher's lounge so we could buy soda from the vending machine.

e) He was my most favorite teacher in high school, and I really loved high school so that's saying something.

Anyway, back to the point: I was blog rocketing and found Cogent's site. This is definitely not my high school teacher, but a great site nonetheless.