by Gib Whitney

Created on: April 13, 2010

What exactly are words? For the most part, simply a collection of sounds that people assigned specific meaning to along the way to help facilitate verbal communication. Cavemen would say that words were just a series of noises to express ideas...they would grunt that of course. Then something called context came along and one had to be aware that some words that were acceptable in one application, might be ill-suited for another. Although some words have similar definitions, they can be as different as night and day depending on the usage such as the words: cheap and frugal.

The word cheap carries a lot of weight and is a put down anyway you slice it; one simply cannot be called cheap and feel that they have just been complimented. Here's an example of it applied after an imaginary night on the town : "the ninety-nine cent burger was wonderful and the double feature of last year's movies spellbinding...thanks for the cheap date." Clearly this date-goer is going to be waiting by the phone for an eternity for a "let's do it again" call. The dictionary has many entries for cheap including: something low in cost; something of poor quality; something not worthy of respect; as well as simply being stingy. A close cousin to cheap, frugal, is quite a different story however.

Unlike cheap, being frugal is considered a good thing in most applications since it is the wise management of cash, or as the dictionary defines it: avoiding the unnecessary expenditure of money. So if our fictitious date-goer responded after being called cheap, that they were instead being frugal so they could collect their hard-earned pennies to help save the endangered wingless blue-butterfly of Brazil, then they would have come out smelling like a rose and most likely would have scored before the night was through.

Definitions aside, there is also a notable difference in the quality of the words from a purely audible stand point. Monosyllable cheap falls off the tongue like a lead weight, and readily rhymes with other mundane sounding words like: Jeep (a cheap American car), and reek (a foul odor), unlike the melodious frugal, that rolls off the tongue and sounds more like something culinary than a descriptive term for someone who watches their spending. Ironically, it also rhymes with strudel and noodle, and I could easily imagine someone asking for another slice of frugal, if it were indeed a food item.

One really cannot go wrong with the word frugal in both sound quality and definition. In fact, if it were used more often and the word cheap eradicated altogether, most of the world's problems would probably just go away... alright, none of the world's problems would go away, but at least a few more people would feel better about the fact they were being tight with their cash, and in the end would come out smelling like a rose.

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