August 26, 2005
I can see for miles and miles from up here on this horse
The longer I work with educators, the more I realize why Americans are making stupidized with the English languagings.
I keep being handed documents to type which make my English-lit-studyin' heart want to break. These educators do the most awful things to words. They add an "s" to a verb to make it a noun--i.e. "learnings," which I guess is just as logical as "findings" but still makes my ears cringe--or they add "ize" to nouns and adjectives to make them sound more officialized. (This is a trend Michele and I have been tracking in the media as well--we first heard "weaponized" on an episode of Alias, but the word has spread as far as the new Batman film and beyond.)
Plus, these educators capitalize pretty much at random, as if they're writing copy for a Medieval Times dinner theater program. Principals, Office Managers, the Main Office, Deans, the Executive Assistant (that's me!), even School. Pretty much the only thing struggling along in lower case now is the poor little students.
Now, I can put up with weird word usage and poor capitalizing skills--hell, to correctly usize the English is downright un-American. But the prose, baby, the miserable prose, which spends the day getting pantsed and wedgied by educators who ought to be more mature than that. Let me give you just a few examples from a document I recently typed up, entitled "Teacher Leaders," a title which ought to be making your brain ache all by itself.
Leadership is every teacher’s responsibility but not at every moment. Because leadership does bring with it some tensions, some will find it more inviting in a variety of situations and over a longer period of time.
Poorly phrased? Yep. But is the underlying idea a good one? Who the hell can tell? Things get vaguer further on:
The connection between teacher leadership and principal leadership through mutual leadership, shared sense of purpose and encouragement of individual variations and differences.
This is a quote from a book written by four people. I can only assume they were dividing the responsibility for each individual sentence between them, and the guy who was supposed to write the verb was sick that day. As well as the guy who was supposed to make any sense at all.
I've complained to some of my educator colleagues, who claim they need these words and phrases to bolster their professional jargon. Oh, teachers, I urge you: use the good old-fashioned English for your jargon, and abandon all this non-speak and triple-talk. There can be no question that using proper sentence construction and words that actually exist will be as incomprehensible to non-educators as your current educatizing slangs. After all, you and your ilk have been running the public schools for several decades, and have so intolerably fucked up the general public, linguistically speaking, that their understanding of English is nearly as eroded as your own.
Posted by didofoot at 11:48 AM | Comments (8)
August 21, 2005
James and the giant vocabulary
After years of avoiding him, I'm finally taking James Joyce for a spin. I made the decision once I'd exhausted all my Trollope. After he limped off the floor, I was looking around for a partner and there was James, as usual, sitting shyly against the wall on an uncomfortable folding shelf, watching me eagerly. I sighed.
The thing is, nobody wants to dance with James. He's a nice enough guy, with The Dubliners and so on to recommend him, but who wants to spend the evening staring at the enormous Finnegan's Wake growing out of his face? Still, he keeps hanging around. For a while it seemed like we were going to be rid of him at last--all the professors who had befriended him are getting old, on their last legs--eventually there'll be no one to speak up for him and then, surely, he'll have to go. But then last semester Sean took pity on him, like an idiot, and once Sean is your friend you have both feet solidly planted in the door and you're not going anywhere.
And there he was, watching me hopefully from the sidelines. He tried to make himself as appealingly thin as possible, narrowing into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as if he'd always been that size. I looked around the room desperately. There was Pynchon, but after our last fling I could hardly go back to him without swallowing my pride and a heavy dose of conspiracy theories. Arthur Miller and Nabokov, two longtime companions, were busy smoking cigarettes on the patio. Of course there's always the Grimm Brothers, but they're so juvenile most of the time. Nope, I was stuck with James. So I nodded to him to come over and we started to boogey.
"Say, James," I noted, "you're not such a bad dancer." Once we'd gotten past the initial nervous "moocow coming down the road" nonsense, James actually settled down into a respectable foxtrot. In fact, as the dance wore on, he became downright inspired. Before I knew it, we'd danced the better part of the afternoon and evening away.
I guess I haven't been entirely fair to JJ all these years. In fact, if I can just get him to shut up about hellfire, this might be a love match after all.
Posted by didofoot at 11:00 AM | Comments (4)
August 15, 2005
In brief
My cell rings. I glance at my caller ID, see that it is my friend from work, and answer thusly: "Idiot."
[Stunned silence.]
"This way," I explain, "the conversation can only get better from here."
Posted by didofoot at 07:29 PM | Comments (1)
August 06, 2005
Run mad as often as you chuse
Last night the Lad and I found ourselves at Slim's for the Dick Dale show. Once the opener, Thirsty, had cleared out and most of the heavy metal fans had left or faded to the back, the Lad and I were suddenly surrounded by men in their 50's; men with grizzled hair and Hawaiian shirts and glasses; men who were looking forward to some serious surf guitar and didn't care who knew it.
"My God," the Lad breathed, looking around. "It's the clones of Clark."
"Quick, make a pun," I cried. "You could rule them all!"
While we waited for Dick to take the stage, the audience was treated to a projected video called 60's A-Go-Go. "It's as if they're saying to us: No matter what you might think, Dick Dale is a relic of the sixties and by Heaven we're gonna keep him there," I said. As the increasingly long delay wore on, the Lad suggested there might have been problems opening Dick's time capsule where he had been stored in a cool, dry place since 1968.
Finally, after more than an hour of standing (including the Thirsty songs we had caught), Dick emerged from his capsule. It was immediately clear to me that management had fucked up. Dick wore a black sweatband around his forehead, a snazzy vinyl jacket, a sparkling guitar strap and a long, sweaty ponytail, and repeatedly used the word "bitchin."
"You morons!" I heard the manager snarling from the back room. "When you packed him in there, you must have set the stasis dial to 1988, not 68!"
Though Dick was pure eighties in attire, he started off with some excellent sixties crowd pleasers. After two and a half songs, I was so pleased that I started to black out. Possibly it was the hour and a half of standing, though--despite my impressive physique, the truth is I am a champion sitter and not good for much else.
As I began to elegantly crumple up against the Lad, he managed to grab me (while holding my helmet, my coat, and a few soon-to-be-shattered dreams of his own about getting to see a Dick Dale show in its entirety) and heroically manhandled me through the crowd. Though my vision was mostly dark and I kept forgetting to inhale, I had enough sense to realize the excitement of my position. Nearly passing out! Being looked at! Boyfriend heroically rescuing me! Stepping on people's feet!
We got outside and sat on the pavement for awhile, listening to Dick finish up "House of the Rising Sun" inside (of all the songs for me to pass out during). A staff member gave me some water and the Lad gave me a ride home. As I lay in bed that night, I was pleased. Pleased to have seen a legendary guitarist. Pleased to have ruined part of a great song for as many people as I could step on. Pleased to have taken an important musical experience away from the Lad. Pleased that I would finally have something to blog about in the morning.
Posted by didofoot at 11:23 AM | Comments (3)
