A Word...

I listened intently for an accent or discernable speech defect or impediment. He had none. Given my already blackened heart, it was necessary to answer those questions in the negative in order to tell the tale. If the guy’s problem extended beyond the failure of our educational system, it would be mean spirited to tell you that indeed he said, “CAPACATY” (Kuh-pa-kuh-T). He said it at least a dozen times during the four and one half mile ride. Again and again and again he told passengers waiting to board, “I’m sorry, this bus cannot take any more passengers. It is over capacaty.” Each time he said capacaty, I would forget how much I hated public transportation and instead perseverated over how much I detested the point in fact that the bus driver could not pronounce the word capacity. I even took out a pen and wrote “capacaty” on the label of the jar of peanut butter in my bag. I was getting confused. Each time he said capacaty he hesitated on the last two syllables as if he had a little grammar cop in his head saying, “Dude, you’re going to F**K it up again!” And once more out came capacaty; my head hurt more.

(As an aside: Microsoft Word keeps automatically changing capacaty to capacity as I type. This makes me wonder how far off in the future a spell-check chip for our brains will happen.)

A couple times he changed things up a bit and uttered “capacacy” (kuh-pa-kuh-C) instead of capacaty. That too had a marked embarrassed tone at the end. Then I noticed a girl facing me of maybe 16 or 17yrs., who weighed 275 if a pound. She was wearing skinny jeans. I was a bit jealous of her calves; they were at least twice the size of my own. She seemed so happy although, I noticed that her forehead furrowed each time the driver said capacaty or capacacy. “Yeah,” I thought, “even big girl know he be sayin’ it wrong.”