Jane Austen, part deux: Vocabulary lesson

Tonight, PBS showed the the first part of the Sense & Sensibility miniseries on PBS, as I mentioned last Sunday, and my younger daughter and I snuggled in for another mother/daughter cultural experience. In case you forget, she's 10. That really wonderful stage (for moms anyway) right between child and young woman, and I'm taking advantage of it as much as I can, as long as I can.

So, in the show, Marianne Dashwood had encountered the two available bachelors in the new neighborhood--Willoughby, handsome and young, and Colonel Brandon, handsome and not so young. When the two men approached each other at a dinner party and the sinister music swelled along with the tension, my daughter exclaimed, almost under her breath, "Collusion!"

Huh? Collusion? I thought that's what she had said, but she has this habit of refusing to repeat words if she's not sure she used them correctly. (Um, probably because she figures I'm going to blog about it.)

Finally, I pried it out of her, and told her I thought it probably worked for the situation. I looked it up later, and it worked reasonably well in that moment. Come to find out as the story developed, not so much after all.

(From dictionary.com, "a secret agreement, esp. for fraudulent or treacherous purposes; conspiracy")

So, there I sat, wallowing in my pride, wondering where on earth my darling daughter learns these words and uses them fairly well in context. But she had something else to say, so she changed the subject.

"My pits smell good. Like flowers."

Apparently, in addition to learning and experimenting with new vocabulary, she also appreciates her new deodorant.