Another Name

We attended an adult education class on the topic of noise and silence and then read a book about a woman who adopted the practice of silence twice a month.

When I was in the third grade my teacher called me a chatterbox and then called my mother to report that I was too social and prattled on when I should have been doing something else.

I never preceived myself as too talkative nor did I think I was a disturbance to the class. My conversations were quiet and only after I finished the work, but Miss Diamond couldn't abide any talk and we were, according to her standards, a class of chatter boxes. My mother wasn't the only mother to be brought into her classroom in order to hear the same comment.

For years I thought that the term chatterbox was derogatory, but recently I discovered that there is an orchid called the Chatterbox Orchid (Epipactis gigantea). It's all a matter of semantics.