Trying to explain my opinion of American culture last night, I realized I had forgotten the word hegemony. At university (the British way of saying college; a part of the weird mixture of American/British English I currently utilize), I encountered this word almost daily. It was a buzzword. I learned it as a freshman and used it in nearly every International Studies essay thereafter. But, all of a sudden, I graduated from university and it disappeared from my life. A few minutes later in the conversation last night, I had the same problem with genetic.

I haven't thought about the concept of hegemony itself in a good few months. (I definitely have considered genetics recently, so that was more of a fluke.) Instead, I spend my time figuring out that you can use the same word in Spanish to describe pouring something in a cup, throwing someone out of your house, and putting on sunscreen (echar), that queso de untar is cream cheese, that cacharro is carnival ride, or that conjunctivitis how you say pinkeye in both Spanish and British English.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. I'll probably never forget hegemony again, nor genetic, but I'll certainly forget other pretentious intellectual words that I don't utilize nearly as often in Spain. I must keep up with my reading of the New York Times, etc. After all, that is what my International Studies degree taught me to do...