The other day, Callaghan got up from the couch and announced, “It’s time to do your gargarisms!”

It was one of those moments I had to just sit and mull over his words for a few seconds. (It happens every once in a while.) Then I realized that he’d gone to the kitchen and taken a glass from the cabinet, and he was standing in the half-moon light of the open refrigerator door, pouring carbonated water into the glass, and it hit me: he was saying that it was time to gargle.

Context is a wonderful, helpful thing.

“Un gargarisme,” Callaghan explained over my burst of hilarity, “is how you say it in French.” But he was cracking up, too, as usual.

That was our first good laugh of the week. Gargarisms! I had to do my gargarisms, yes. And that is a brilliant new word, I thought.

The greatest part of the story, though, is that when I went online to look up “gargarism” (thinking that someone else might have found it funny to twist the verb “to gargle” into a noun), I discovered that it actually exists!

The noun is classified as “obsolete,” but it’s legit nonetheless. I’d learned a new word! Two new words, in fact, since I learned both the English and the French versions.

Anyway, I started doing the gargarisms with soda water this week at the suggestion of a medical website in an attempt to get my throat to stop attacking itself,* as it’s been stuck in a cycle of producing mucus as a response to nothing at all, causing me to have to clear my throat all the time. I mean, ALL. THE. TIME. This started back in December, almost a year ago, so I’m really kind of over it at this point. The V.A. is sending me to speech therapy, because sometimes that can help. Pending that, pass the club soda so I can do my gargarisms. (I cannot get enough of that word. GARGARISMS!)

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*I have autoimmunity, which means that my body habitually goes on sprees of attacking itself (meaning, me). It does this at random and as a response to stress and sometimes for no reason at all. Some of my problems are chronic (Autoimmune Thyroiditis, aka Hashimoto’s Disease; Reynaud’s Phenomenon). One is chronic and currently in remission (Sjögren’s Syndrome). I’m on the appropriate meds, and things are being managed just fine… except for the thyroid disease, which has recently decided to overstep the bounds of its medication. We will be having none of that! A batch of increased Synthroid prescription is in the mail as we speak, so hopefully I’ll feel less tired once I switch to the higher dosage.