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Before you can understand the purpose of this column, I feel that it is necessary for you to know the context from which it derived. I am currently (as I type) DEEPLY involved in completing my very last assignments for my doctoral studies.
In a week’s time I will have ONLY my dissertation to complete.
But I digress because it is not the quantity of my degree pursuit which remains, but rather the quality of the work I feel I must produce, which serves as the impetus for this column. More simply, and perhaps directly stated, I looked back at all my prior columns to find the letters in the alphabet that I have not yet used in my initial description.
The letters that I noted were J, K, Q, V and X. I thought about using a V word but decided that Q would be the best and most challenging choice for a (slightly) burnt-out scholar…
Again, to further reiterate the context of derivation for this column, I have managed to effectively pair the Q letter with an appropriate descriptive word as I did, indeed, perform a query.
However, and upon further reflection, I am considering that the results of the query are not really the point of this column, but more so the action of performing the query.
This is, ironically, a very academic thing to do, making the use of the word query only a fancier word for the action of investigate?
But now I have just looked up synonyms for query and feel that the two words are not interchangeable as a query is really a less purposeful word for discovering information.
Perhaps, dare I admit, that one could argue that a query is only a somewhat superficial and irrelevant inquiry rather than an investigation.
Upon further consideration, I will stand firm in my selection and use of the word query to describe the action performed but will now wholeheartedly recognize that the actual point of the query in the first place stemmed, perhaps, from too many hours of recent research.
Upon final reflection, I am led to that realization that in life, it is always best to remember that what people say and do are, typically, because of what they just or are currently experiencing.
In other words, it is often the context of the situation which elicits the response.
It is why we prefer eating more salads in January after the bevy of sweets we consume during the holidays. It is why we promote purchasing electric cars after paying an exorbitant amount for filling up a gas tank.
It is why we buy an alarm system after having been robbed. It is why I wrote this column…
In the end, I have decided that querying about what letters in the alphabet my previous columns have omitted was an unnecessary inquiry.
One might even describe it as…
… Vexing. Vexing.
Kathy Naumann, possessor of NATURALLY curly hair and the understanding that you can’t control everything!
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