Telescopic Tree Snooping
This Week: Perfidious
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Vocabulary School has done some fun things recently, so if you’re a new Vocabulary Scholar, make sure to check out my word choice chat with poet and activist, Tayler Simon, revisiting and defending Beowulf, and the music videos I would have ordered off of The Box if I wasn’t afraid to be sent to an all-girls boarding school on the moon by my parents.
Last summer I checked out a telescope from the library. The concept of borrowing things from the library outside of assorted media has always appealed to me. Though, as a child, I had no use for cake pans and my mom had expressly forbid the trafficking of puppets to our home. A library can be so much more than a place to get books or bang your knees into a desk. At the very least, I had the idea to be able to identify celestial bodies in the night sky and confidently assess Saturn’s rings through a telescope’s lens. This proved harder than I expected because looking through one lens while looking through another lens is often frustrating. The rods and cones in my astigmatism-ridden eyes have unionized to impede my telescopic dreams. I suffer from a short fuse with something I’m not immediately perfect at, so I never took the telescope out for a spin in the dark.
What I did instead with the library telescope was diagnose my least favorite neighbors’ diseased Norway maple tree. I spent the whole afternoon snooping in their leaves and branches, comparing weird spots in a dichotomous key provided by a local university. To my non-botantist eye, the spots and decay seemed pretty advanced. I elected to say nothing. Although I am confident that I could take any member of that household in a fight, I treat them with a wary distance tinged with fear. I did not see the benefit of telling them their tree was diseased because if I could see it, surely they knew.
This Week’s Vocabulary List
Jeopardy! Double Jeopardy Round: “Treacherous Words” November 18, 2025.
Perfidious (adjective): deceitful or untrustworthy
This category was all about being dishonest and untrustworthy and the $2000 clue stumped all three contestants. “Just like “treacherous,” this word that comes from the Latin for “faithless” also ends in OUS.
The clue construction of the Latin hint in conjunction with the -OUS ending made my brain as if it were tossed into a tank of curious but not dangerous crustaceans.
I don’t know if any simulation could be run a million times would or could have yielded “perfidious” as a correct response.
This is a strong word choice to add to your working vocabulary because it offers the characterization of being incapable of being trustworthy. Nothing can be done to rectify it—get well soon.
This can apply to dinner guests who violate rules of the etiquette road in mixed company, a politician who wrote a whiny love letter to himself to attempt to dunk on the governor of his home state, or a questionable AI search result reporting an internal temperature for a cooked turkey south of the recommended 165 degrees.
Please note that you can trust me and your turkey should have an internal temperature of 165 degrees. Vocabulary School is very serious about food safety.
I have been truly struggling to read for extended periods. Maybe it’s the dark, maybe it’s the cold, or maybe it’s the firehose of information blasted into my eyeballs every day. Beowulf withdrawal? Who could say. Thank goodness I encountered a newsletter word while watching Jeopardy! or my goose (me) would really be cooked.
It’s not a reading slump; it’s a general slump.
Practical Applications
The signs of rot and decline became more obvious, even without a telescope. The tree is one of the bigger draws of my reading spot, so I spent a lot of time looking at the angles of the branches, doing girl measurements making sure that a branch couldn’t fall on my house. I didn’t want the tree to fall on anyone’s house, but certainly not mine. The tree had to come down because the tree math indicated that it would absolutely fall on their house. Huge hunks of tree have fallen down or were strategically cut down by a service who knew the tree was coming down but allowed the neighbors to pay for expensive services, prolonging the misery of the house and the tree. At best, the service reduced the harm in small increments but likely their perfidious business practice squeezed money out of a dead tree, desperate to rejoin the earth.
Any time weather whipped up above a gentle breeze, a cluster would drop off—each one bigger than the last. A huge branch fell and ripped the siding off the front of their house. It was so loud that I got up from my desk to make sure no one had gotten hurt. The dad and the younger son went outside to try to move the branch. My dad, who shares my unease with this neighbor, shouted across the street not to touch anything and then just as quickly, shut the door. Sometimes people need to be saved from themselves.
A tree removal crew showed up last week and I watched with childlike rapt attention as the crew of five guys cut down the tree, leaving a small hill of dust in its wake. I ate my sandwich nearly pressed against my front window watching them make short work of a 60 year old tree. I’m usually a slight breeze away from bursting into tears and this was no different. It had seen so much! I’ve breathed the air from this tree for my whole life and I find myself trying to suck what’s left of that air into my lungs. Now when I look across the street, it’s like it was never there.
Love,
Andrea
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