WACKY WEDNESDAY WISDOM- I don't remember Dossier being on my SAT

     As you may know from reading some of my previous musings, I tend to make up words from time to time. It's all part of good writing, I was once told by an English teacher. As long as they know what you're trying to say, grammar and spelling don't really matter. It's about ideas.
     I'll have to admit that lately I've been confronted with words I'm not familiar with. Quite frankly, I may not be as intelligent as I thought I was. Take, for example, the word "dossier". First of all, the only reason I can pronounce it correctly now is because I keep hearing it all over the news. If I had been initially confronted with it on paper and asked to pronounce it, I would have figured it to be something that may have rhymed with the word "glossier", as in- "The paper you have your Pickled Beets Canner of the Year award printed on isn't shiny and attractive enough, it needs to be glossier."
     But that's not how you pronounce the word. I've racked my pea-sized brain to come up with a word that rhymes with the correct pronunciation of dossier and I'm just not cultured or intelligent enough to conjure up one. Not one to give up, I shall try anyway. I guess the closest I can come up with is "floss today", as in- "Don't forget to floss today, else the mean dentist will complain about having to grind the candy apple particles from between your teeth."
     Here's another admission- until I looked it up, I had no idea what a dossier was. I feel, however, that I deserve a pass on that. Before a few months ago, I had never heard the word. Hence, unless I was one of those champion spelling bee kids who look up words in the dictionary from sunup to sundown, how could I be expected to know what it was? Travel with me to 1981 if you will, and sit next to me while I'm taking the SAT, before it was recentered (which happened in 1995) to make the test scores seem more impressive. If the word "cellphone" had appeared in the English section, neither you nor I would have had no clue. Ditto for dossier now.
     A totally redneck pronunciation guide for "dossier" for those of you who still can't get it would be something like- "doss (rhymes with wasp without the p) ee (pretty much see without the s) ay (day without the d) and so it's doss-ee-ay. Sorry English teachers, that's the redneck way and I can relate to it. But that still doesn't help me with the definition.
     And that's important all of a sudden because that's all you hear in the news. Where is the dossier? Have you read the dossier? Who wrote the dossier? Did somebody tells lies in the dossier? Will people go to jail because of the dossier?
     My first thought was that a dossier was some sort of French crescent sweet roll of some sort. It sounds delicious, as in- "I'll have two eggs, orange juice, and a dossier with whipped cream on top, please". But when they started talking about reading it, I knew I was out of luck.
     I think sometimes people in power and the reporters that cover them try to use big words to give the impression they are smarter than the rest of us in the general population. They can't just say "investigative report", they have to make it sound really smart so they toss the word "dossier" around. I don't like it. Tell it to me straight. I speak Southernese and I can do it with the best of them. If they want to play that game, I could throw some words at them there political and television elitists that would leave them feeling stupid and clamoring for their thesauruses and dictionaries. "Eenin, Maam, purdy sunset, idnit? Right near as purdy as that'un yesty afnoon". (For my non-Southernese readers who prefer formality, the correct interpretation of the above sentence would be something along the lines of "Good evening, my lady, it sure is a delightful sunset, is it not? Reminds me of the one I witnessed not more than 24 hours ago at dusk, just before darkness began to set in". (Still confused? Go back and read the first sentence and see if it now makes better sense. If you had to go back and read again, somebody needs to learn you how to speak Southernese).
     In Matthew 6:7, Jesus warns us about using super size, intelligent sounding words when praying. He reminds us not to babble on and on trying to sound impressive. We can't impress God with our vocabulary. He knew the words cellphone, photobomb, and microchip before the beginning of time. We're not going to tell Him anything He doesn't already know, a fact mentioned in Matthew 6:8, when we are reminded that God already knows what we need before we ask. So trying to word it just right and sound impressive won't get us any points with the Lord. Prayer is not about the words, it's about the relationship. It's about communicating with an open heart with the One who loves us. And that's a whole lot more satisfying than any dossier could ever be, even if they topped it with whipped cream.