Sweet Smelling Millionaires

Sometimes getting it wrong is right….

A friend of mine told me that when he was younger, he misheard the word “centimillionaire” and thought it was “scented millionaire.”

As misunderstandings go, that one makes a certain amount of sense. The phrase “scented millionaire” conjures up a powdered and cosseted rich guy — someone who is sure to have a net worth in excess of $100 million — so it’s easy to see how he could have misheard it. I imagine most centimillionaires do, in fact, have a certain smell, something along the lines of an expensive candle, a Loro Piana sweater, and no real problems to speak of.

What’s harder to understand is just how long it took him to figure out his mistake. He was well into his thirties, he told me, before the lightbulb went off. He was reading an article in the business section of the paper and came across the word “centimillionaire” and suddenly thought, Hey, wait a minute. And as he spoke it slowly out loud he realized his longstanding error, and his mind tried to replay each time he had used the word in the past — well, not “centimillionaire” but “scented millionaire.” Had he humiliated himself and not realized it? Had he used the wrong term and somehow missed the other people in the vicinity smirking and rolling their eyes at each other? He confessed that he was crippled with the anxiety that he had employed the term “scented millionaire” almost daily to the vicious delight of his so-called friends, who no doubt had some kind of secret group chat going where they hooted at each mortifying instance.

The thing to do when a friend is in distress is to share a moment from your own history when you experienced a similar kind of social embarrassment. When I was in college, for instance, I was trying to sound smart in an English class while discussing the familiar literary construction of the “hero’s journey.” The hero always rejects help and guidance initially, I said with great authority, It’s deeply embedded in the Western Tradition, I pompously continued, as we can see in Psalm 23 which begins, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…”

I sat back smugly and ignored the confused looks on the rest of the class. Unlike me, that had not misunderstood the opening lines of Psalm 23 since Sunday School. Unlike me, they did not think that those words meant that I do not want to have the Lord as my shepherd. They knew — had probably always known — that those words mean that with the Lord as my shepherd I don’t need anything, which for some reason eluded me and I never once bothered to notice that my interpretation made zero sense and just kept thinking, for about a decade, that Psalm 23 is about not wanting to be shepherded by the Lord. Which was easy to do because who talks about the Psalms, anyway? I had, in fact, not thought about Psalm 23 from Sunday School until that exact moment in Major English Poets: Chaucer to Eliot when I wanted to sound clever and well-read.

But the mind works awfully fast when it needs to. Somewhere between the moment I said those words and the moment I registered the looks on my classmates’ faces it suddenly dawned on me that the word “want” has a couple of meanings, and that I was using the wrong one. So I covered.

“Obviously,” I began, still sounding like a know-it-all college student desperately in need of a punch in the teeth, “the word want here has a complicated double meaning, both the literal textual one and another more psychologically resonant one that is in play here.”

I think I got away with it, though the fact that I remember it so vividly suggests that I didn’t. The thing to do, as I said, was to share that with my friend in a gesture of solidarity.

I didn’t do that. My mistake was considerably dumber, and I wanted to keep it to myself. Instead, I told him about another friend of ours who in a high school debate competition inveighed against the dangers of nuclear armageddon, which he pronounced Ar-MAGA-don. And we had a good, healing laugh at his expense.