My seven-year-old climbed into the car recently after school and said her day was not good. Her best friend left early because she did not feel well.
“Was she coughing a lot?” I asked, wondering if the flu might have hit the local elementary school.
“No,” my daughter said, “she was feeling obnoxious.”
“Oh, she was,” I chuckled. “Maybe nauseous, like sick to her stomach.”
“Yeah, that’s it,” she said.
Seven-year-olds can get a whole lot of words mixed up. But then, don’t we all?
Let’s go back to “nauseous” for a moment. All my life, I’ve used that word to describe that pre-vomit feeling. But that’s not the right word.
I learned this by embarrassing myself. Back in college, one of my friends always said she felt “nauseated” whenever she felt sick to her stomach. But then I “corrected” her. My mom always said “nauseous,” so that had to be right. And I passed that info along to my friend.
Days later, on a whim, I looked up both words in a dictionary. My friend had been right all along. “Nauseated” describes a person suffering from a queasy tummy, while “nauseous” references something that induces nausea. It seems that for twenty-some-odd years, I had been telling people that, just like the stench…