All right.  I have a confession to make.  I am a word snob.  Stretching from my reign as elementary school spelling bee champion, through honors English classes in high school, to eventually majoring in English in undergrad, I always thought I had the premier vocabulary in any given group of people.  I would mentally snicker when I heard someone misuse a word, and congratulate myself when I incorporated something polysyllabic and overcomplicated into any given conversation.  (Did you see what I did there?  I used "polysyllabic" instead of "long word".  This is what I mean.  It's a problem I have.)

Well, ladies and gentleman, pride goeth before the fall in law school as in life, and I fell pretty hard on my second day of my 1L experience.  No, it was not because of the sheer weight of my textbooks, although that may have been a factor.  It happened in Contracts.  Literally on the first day of class, my professor managed to call into question everything I had ever known to be true about myself and my verbal skills.

Fungible.  The word in question was fungible.  And no, I wasn't Socratic-ed and embarrassed in front of the class.  It was more subtle, more insidious than that.  My Contracts professor just slipped that word into his lecture and moved on.  At first I thought maybe this was a legal term that I just hadn't become aware of before.  But it didn't sound technical.  It simply sounded like an adjective.  I turned to the guy sitting next to me, writing "Fungible?" on my notebook in a desperate plea for help, but to no avail.

After leaving class, this word, this..."fungible,"  continued to haunt me.  I debated whether or not looking it up on Wikipedia would be a statement of defeat.  I couldn't even remember the last time I had heard a word I didn't know that wasn't in another language.  And then, finally, not unlike a Charlton Heston movie, I had my moment of revelation.  Like many Charlton Heston-esque experiences in my life, it may have been painful, but it was unavoidable.

I'm not good at law school yet.  I have no idea what's going on.  I now humbly Google any and all unfamiliar words, nostalgic for the days when I was on top of the vocabulary game.  Especially because I don't even understand the definition of "fungible", much less the word itself.  You win, law school.  You win this time.