Vocab Word o'th' Week:

CHEROPHOBIA

NOTE: I have decided that I’m going to begin again a little weekly writing tradition that I used to do back on an old blog: the Vocab Word of the Day. This time, it’ll be weekly, on Fridays. Let me know if you’re having fun with these and I’ll continue them as long as I find cool and interesting words (so, like, forever). This was originally posted on a blog I wrote under a pen name, and then re-published on Daily Cross-Swords on June 30, 2019. Enjoy!

…

I had a good friend during the dregs and just out of my college days, name of Christina. She was six foot one in bare feet, ectomorphic & slender, with a glorious shoulder length of densely curly, dark orange ginger hair. She had alabaster skin and a loudly raucous laugh. She never hesitated to ask questions or to demand you clarify if she didn’t understand something—an unabashedly curious woman, always. A few of my friends (including my then-fiancé and an old eccentric I knew from high school) were roommates with her, all of us bunked in a lovely suburban bungalow with a finished garage which is where she lived. One of our several roommates, a fellow aerial dancer in the same company as me, had a pet python (or was it a boa constrictor?)—a big yards-long female serpent named Lucy (short for Lucifer). Christina would quite often, post-shower, in tank top and pj bottoms, pace the sidewalk just outside our house, chatting on the phone, Lucy draped over her shoulders and entwined in her arms, while her bright red hair dried in the sun. I’m convinced our neighbors must’ve thought she was Eve incarnate, or some other kind of goddess. They weren’t completely wrong.

It was Christina and I, in our several jaunts to the Trident coffeeshop & bookstore, who coined the phrase “literati” to denote a social date that was focused on study, and intellectual and cultural criticism in conversation. Famously, it was us whose conclusion to Kandinsky’s manifesto was, “shut up and paint.” She was an art history major, a couple years my junior, and so was concluding her studies even as I graduated, sword-fighted (!), trapezed, and continued to write and read through my own artistic endeavors. She was my co-producer for the wee theatre company I named Five Funny Faces after a beloved theatre prof’s regular class-closing game, the first time we did the Dr. Seuss show, and it was she who taught me how to eat sushi as we counted the house takings post-show each night.

What’s my point in describing the amazing Christina, when the title of this post is a particular, not obviously related, vocabulary word? Well, this imposing, snake wrangling, ginger goddess, one who worked theatrical rigging as her job when I knew her, and who went on to be a rigger for Cirque du Soleil after she graduated, had one potent aversion; a distaste as powerful as she was. A phobia, if you will.

She hates cherubs.

Now recall: she has an art history degree. So she knows her cultured way around sculpture and painting of all kinds that depict the many angelic denizens of the heavenly realm, Christian and otherwise. She has no beef with angels in general, or warriorlike seraphim with their flaming swords...all that is fine. It’s the “fat winged babies,” as she puts it, that she cannot stand. I think they literally make her physically ill.

It was such a stigma (not stigmata) to her that we would give her birthday cards each year adorned with the cutest fat baby cherubs we could find, just to watch her squirm and retch. Good times.

I know that’s not what this vocab word actually means, but that’s what it made me think of, and though the real meaning of the word continues to be part of my regular life, I choose not to dwell on the dark and depressive prospect of the real definition. I choose instead to mistranslate it, by way of celebrating the beautiful and extraordinary Christina, who has a major cherub phobia.

CODA: last I heard, she is married to a Canadian whom she met during her Cirque adventures, and lives in Canada with him on a houseboat.

I need to email her. Hey Christina, if you’re reading this, here ya go: