Meaning to confuse, to jumble, to bamboozle – Jargogle

As I get older, I find myself being jargogled quite a bit.  I used to be terrified that perhaps I had early onset of Alzheimer’s or Dementia, but in all reality, I just have so many thoughts bouncing around my  head that sometimes, those thoughts overlap each other and  both thoughts come out of my mouth at the same time causing vocabulary chaos.  I have 62 years of information in my head and I’m not quite sure how much room there is left in my brain for anything new, so sometimes it all gets a bit squishy in there.

I guess it’s a bit like an excited child who gets their ‘mords wixed up’. It also doesn’t help that my  hearing isn’t as fantastic as it used to be.  I used to be able to hear a pin drop from a mile away. To be fair, I still can.  But if that pin is speaking, I can hear it but don’t always understand what it was saying unless it has lips and I can lip read AND hear, both together.  So I am often trying to understand and reply all at the same time, which really jargogles me.  

I also find that when reading something, it can take more time to decipher it these days.  To be honest, if something doesn’t pique my interest I often have to reread and I’ve been like that all my life. But I was trying to put wheels on a new oil heater yesterday.  Now I have assembled more furniture and stuff in my lifetime than the inventor of IKEA, so I feel very confident in putting stuff together, and nothing really daunts me.  But these instructions made no sense whatsoever.  And of course, I am more impatient these days so if I don’t understand it first time, I get angry then I have even more trouble understanding it as I’m in a bad mood. 

But to be fair to me this time, the instructions were absolute garbage.  I think they are sometimes translated from another language by a computer program and it doesn’t translate to English in a way in which we would speak.  The words are there but the meaning is lost in translation. That’s my story anyway, and I’m sticking to it. 

The beauty of it of course, is that I have reached an age where I can laugh at myself when I mishear, mispronounce or just generally stuff up. I have stopped taking myself so seriously and I actually enjoy the ridiculousness that comes out of my mouth sometimes. I know that it is tempered with occasional wisdom so it’s an even balance. And I’ve embraced my weirdness. It’s a great place to find yourself.

Imagine if we never did anything wrong. If we never made a mistake. If we never lost or failed at what we set out to achieve. Every sports match would be a draw. Every movie would be shot in one take and there would be no bloopers. Violet Crumble (choc coated honeycomb) would never have been invented. What a boring world that would be.

We learn so much from failure, from mistakes, from stuffing up. Life is an adventure. It’s good to know what direction we are heading in but we have to embrace the stumbles, the roadblocks and the forked roads that throw a little bit of ambiguity in our way. It’s only when we fall down that we know how strong we are by getting back up, brushing ourselves down and moving on again. A little jargogling every now and then never hurt anyone.

Happy to be jargogled….Livvy xxx