Say what???

This week, I finally paid attention to my lack of grasp of certain vocabulary words. In my line of work, I always have to feed myself with information so that I would not stagnate to just using the very limited jargon I have in my mind.

When I was still a student, I had this weird "hobby" of reading the dictionary and highlighting some words that I thought would be useful to me someday. I'd write them on my yellow pad with their corresponding definitions and then I'd try to write sentences using those words. I know, I was such a geek before. Haha. But you know what they say, when you graduate, you only retain a small percentage of what you learned from school in your mind.


Then they said that because there's no pressure to learn as much as when you were in school (tests, prelims, finals--helloo??), your brain starts to stop working as much as it did. Its not as alert anymore.

So now, instead of just going through my uber dusty dictionary (yeah its still alive, barely breathing but definitely alive...haha), I've upgrading my "hobby" to checking out the Word of the Day portion at www.dictionary.com.

Today, their word of the day is HOMOLOGOUS. \huh-MOL-uh-guhs; hoh-\, adjective:
1. corresponding in position, proportion, structure, value, or other property
2. in biology, corresponding in type of structure and in origin but not necessarily in appearance or function
3. in chemistry, belonging to a series where successive members differ regularly in formula, especially a series of organic compounds differing by multiples of CH2, such as the alcohols and aldehydes

A human hand, a bird's wing and a whale's flipper are all homologous structures, she explains, in that each represents an evolutionary modification of the same ancestral limb structure.
-- John Noble Wilford, But Will It Fly?" review of Taking Wing: Archaeopteryx and the Evolution of Bird Flight, by Pat Shipman, New York Times, 1/25/1998

But I think I know what you're probably thinking now. How the hell can this word be useful to your everyday life? Its not as if you talk about chemistry or biology all the time.



Well, that is my challenge. And here is how I can use it in my everyday life. I think.

1. Two years after graduation, I can probably say that my intelligence is homologous to that of a grade 3 student already.

or

2. Grabeha bai, akong kwarta ron ug ang kwarta sa lata nga gigunitan sa batang garugby homologous na!

Whatever.

How about you? Can you cite ways on how to incorporate the word "homologous" into your everyday life?