When I was a very little child, I was fascinated by language play (shocker) and made up my own vocabulary / was fascinated by other languages.

When I was three or four, my parents owned some kind of a sedan with a powered sunroof. Based on the electric screeching noise made when the sunroof retracted, I created a new onomatopoetic noun for any car with a sunroof: “soreecher,” which my parents found heartily entertaining. They can tell the story to this day. I think there were other Greg-specific vocabulary words, but I can’t remember them.

Then when I was five or six I learned how to sing O Come All Ye Faithful in Latin based on some songbook we had lying around the house. It wasn’t long before I realized some of the Christmas carols and liturgical singing in the Missal at church (Our Lady of the Lake in Branson) were printed in both English and Latin, so I would ignore Bible readings and the homily and study the Latin lyrics.

Later I read The Lord of the Rings (two versions of Elvish and other imaginary languages) and when I was a teenager, contemporary English writers like Iris Murdoch (dialect: In England you “lay” the table instead of “setting” it, “ring off” instead of “hang up” the phone and “go to hospital” instead of “go to THE hospital”) and then I finally became a double-major in French in college.

It all began with sunroofs. But I am not the smartest ever.