Zymurgy's Day Job Is To Raise Spirits

The United States Army spent a lot of time and money to teach me how to repair jet turbine engines - something I knew nothing about.

After training me to repair jet engines, the Army assigned me to the Fort Lewis School Command, where I would teach remedial reading - something else I knew nothing about.

I did have some experience teaching, but I taught mathematics, and I did not see much crossover from math into remedial reading.  The Army expected me to raise soldiers up from illiteracy to literacy.  According to the Federal government, a literate person is someone who can read at the fifth-grade level.

To find out how teach reading, I had to do a lot of reading about reading.

One day I came across a list: The 200 Most Common Words in the English Language.  I thought the list was interesting and decided to share it with the other reading instructors at the Fort Lewis School Command. 

So, I proceeded to type out the list, which was in alphabetical order: "a", "about" "after", "again", "an”, down to "write", "you", "your".  I typed them in six columns.  When I finished, I thought that column six looked a little sad because it was two words shorter than all the other columns.

Just for fun, I added "zwieback" after "your".  Then I turned to the last page in the dictionary and added "zymurgy" to the bottom of the sixth column.

Zymurgy is the branch of chemistry dealing with fermentation, as in beer brewing.  Someone once described zymurgy this way: “Its day job is to raise spirits, while it moonlights as the last word in the dictionary."  

I passed out copies of my list to the other instructors.  I was certain that they would get a kick out of my little joke at the end of column six.  Instead, my list caused confusion:

    "Doug, are you sure that zymurgy is a common word?"

   "Doug, I have never seen the word zymurgy before; how can it be a common word?"

   "Doug, I have no idea what this word at the end of the list means.  Surely, it can’t be a very common word."

My joke had backfired.  How could people think for even a moment that zymurgy is a common word?  

Then it hit me: they saw the word in black-and-white on my list.  If you read it, it must be true.  

The printed word has power.  

So much power that a few instructors at the Fort Lewis School Command, for a brief moment in 1968, actually believed that zymurgy was one of the 200 most common words in the English language.

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NOTE: Doug's best stories have been collected into a book: Puppy Out Of Breath.  Price = $11.  You can purchase a copy at  http://www.puppyoutofbreath.com