Thanks to Sister Mary Clarentia (who we adoring called Sister Tarantula or The Tranch for short) in seventh grade, I fell in love with the usage rules of the English language. When I went on to high school, Sister Ursula, (Sister Rubber Lips, sorry. † self) my Latin teacher, showed how language had even stricter rules. In my senior year, Ms. M-P (the first person I knew who had a hyphenated last name.. she still scolds me that she doesn’t want me to use her real name in my blog) showed me that these rules can be manipulated to create all ranges of emotion and bend people to your will based on your words alone.
Wow, that was real power, I thought, I wanted more of this seductive drug.
I also wanted to rule the world, so when I got to college, I thought I wanted to study linguistics. I was wrong, but that is a story for another day. I ended up studying English, dragging a linguistics minor along a tow rope behind me like one of those bouncy spring dogs. The important take-away was linguistics saved me from being a badge-wielding, zero-tolerance, know-it-all English major grammar cop your mother warned you to stay away from.
Yeah, I’m aware I ended that sentence with a preposition. You don’t think I did it on purpose just to rankle the grammar police? Or is you calling me stupid? Which is it, punk? Go ahead, make my day!
In linguistics class that first day, I quickly learned that grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. Grammars are descriptive, not prescriptive. Grammar rules depend on where the language is spoken and can change dramatically within a social group.
Ah-ha! This was incredibly cool and opened up a whole new level of creativity with language. It made the writer an artist. It also explains why politicians feel they need to speak with a Southern drawl when they visit the Deep South* but that is also another story for another day, y’all.
M’grits is gettin’ cold. Hang fer a minute…
My second linguistics class — after surviving Introduction to Linguistics where they teach you phonetic transcription trumps orthography every time — was taught by a particularly arrogant French professor.
We American students made the mistake of pronouncing the word sauté as sɐté.** She immediately flew into a rage, saying the correct pronunciation was sóte. She was right, of course, we had been pronouncing the word incorrectly for years. But it was our Upper Midwest grammar and she was wrong to correct our transcription.
I’m not even going to get into the argument of whether or not the /t/ was a dental or alveolar consonant. We couldn’t even agree on the vowel and the stress.
Thing is we were both right grammatically and since we were in Minnesota, she should have been pronouncing it sɐté if she had any hopes of fitting in. She did not care about fitting in. She was French. When in Rome, it is always best to adopt the grammar that the Latins use and quit Gaulling people by being haughty.
I think that was the lesson.
I still went and got me the English degree, but always kept my left-brained linguistics minor in tow. It is firmly bolted to my jaw and activates itself whenever my right-brained English degree feels like it should pop off and correct someone’s “grammar.”
What does a sauté pan and correcting someone’s grammar have in common? If you do one, you’re likely to get hit with the other. Or a skillet. Or frying pan. Or spider.
**My IPA transcription is really rusty. Feel free to call me out on this by sending the correct notation if I got this wrong.
This blog post is part of a blog-off series with a group of bloggers from different professions and world views, each exploring a theme from his/her world view. This was about exploring the theme, What’s your grammar pet peeve? To explore how others handled the theme, check them out below. I will add links as they publish.
SXSW Interactive starts tomorrow and I feel like I should be putting up a post on the topic, even though I’m not going. As I watch my twitter stream on the topic, it occurs to me that the experience is vastly different for my crowd vs. the A-lister crowd.
Of course I have a short parable… or metaphor… or whatever to illustrate my point. Here goes.
If Chris Brogan forgets his charger for his MacBook Air, he tweets out something like “Hey, can anyone lend me a charger for a MBAir?” Within minutes, he will have his pick of twenty or so to happily charge his Mac.
If I forget my charger for my MacBook Air, I would tweet out “Hey, can anyone lend me a charger for a MBAir?”
Crickets. Not only would I get crickets, but I may even get RTed with lines like “some idiot forgot his charger at SXSW. LOL”
Who said that wishes would be heard and answered when wished on the morning star?
Somebody thought of that and someone believed it, and look what it’s done so far.
Someone was first with the idea that if he wished on a star and believed, that his wish would come true. He created this idea from two disparate objects — a wish and a star — out of nothing other than his imagination. At some point, he shared his fragile idea with someone else. And that someone else had a choice to either embrace it as a fantastic idea and fan it… or belittle it, ridicule it and kill it.
In that ever brief moment, the spark of a creative idea took hold. It was fanned with nothing more than a human belief that could not be verified. No ROI was produced, no matrices were created to measure against; just a spark of human thought against the wonder of the world that surrounded the thinker.
While frantically running errands on Thursday afternoon before our industrialized world decided that it would shut down at 5:00pm, I caught the middle of a discussion on NPR where a guest was talking about how music and arts are being systematically removed from school curriculum in favor of more STEM classes to comply with No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. (I can’t find the program; npr.org stinks as a curation site.) What we are doing is creating generations of human beings who do not value art or music.
What we are losing is the ability to create, recognize and fan the spark of creativity.
I’m going out right now to wish really hard on a star. Join me.
PS Just as he starts to play the piano, watch Richard smile slightly. I’ll bet someone said something like, “You can’t perform a hit song on a toy piano!” How many times have creative people heard something couldn’t (or shouldn’t) be done. How many times a day do you hear it?
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This blog post is part of a blog-off series with a group of bloggers from different professions and world views, each exploring a theme from his/her world view. This was about exploring the theme, That song stuck in your head To explore how others handled the theme, check them out below. I will add links as they publish.
If you’re gonna make a movie that features a dog and that movie wins Best Actor and Best Picture of the Year, we’re gonna have a thing or two to say about it. I’m talking about The Artist starring Uggie and a few human beings in supporting roles, of course.
We don’t do movie reviews here, though this film is certainly worthy of one. After seeing it a few dozen more times, I may write one. For now, though, here are two observations.
“Silent” media gives a voice to the mute or the flawed.
Social media channels are for the most part, silent media. They do not require anyone to actually be themselves or show themselves in photos or video. You are what your words are in blog posts, in tweets, in Facebook updates and such. You do not need to be a great speaker, be able to carry a tune or dance to perform in the social media space. Social media gave to many nerds and geeks what silent film gave to George Valentin (and Uggie the dog if you want to extend the metaphor.) Sorry, you will have to see the film to the very end to understand this reference. Yeah, I know.. but life has no short-cuts.
Unfortunately for most, video is on the rise in the social media space, giving it a real voice in much the same way talkies did for silent film. Many stars will fall by the wayside, but it will also make way for the young. “People are tired of old actors mugging at camera to be understood. Out with the old, in with the new. Make way for the young! That’s life!” (Peppy Miller, The Artist)
Hating on the French
Can we just stop that already? As the Oscars went on and The Artist picked up more awards, my twitter stream filled up with anti-French tweets. I think we may be able to learn a little bit from Jean Dujardin who said in his acceptance speech, “I love your country” and proclaimed his delight for cinnamon rolls on the red carpet. If a big star like Dujardin can find delight in the smallest, pedestrian things about America, why can’t we find these same things about the French?
We all have flaws. Some of us are socially awkward; some are camera-shy. Still others have stage-fright and other have a French accent. Most of us are the dogs that run around the feet of others, just trying to get some attention. The tools you learned to use to overcome your flaws may not help you next year.
The survivors in this game are not the young as Peppy Miller suggested, but those who are willing and able to adapt.
I remember growing up in St. Paul, there was a donut shop on University and Dale that made the best raised donuts in the world. They were big and my favorite was a chocolate with crushed peanuts on top. We would take a special trip there every few months and only get one donut for each of us. The donut would take forever to eat.
We had the same relationship with the Dairy Queen on Rice St. We would visit the DQ on the Sundays our family drove down by the Mississippi to watch the barge traffic. We didn’t go for those drives often and we would always only get a small cone per kid. No matter how hot it was, that ice cream would last for a long time.
I was fourteen or so or so before I ever ate at a McDonalds. My first experience there was with a friend and his uncle after seeing Star Wars. I can’t remember what I had but I remember thinking I wanted more of this stuff.
We grew up where usually the only day we ate meat was Sunday. It was either chicken or beef roast. If we had meat, it was hamburger (pâté chinois) or liver. The other days were mostly pasta meals. And there was almost never enough for the seven of us, though my mom did the best she could stretching with mashed potatoes and dumplings.
We had three channels on a B&W television. Our shared media collection were vinyl LPs consisting of Hank Williams, Hank Snow, a Disney collection of children’s songs that included a version of “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” Teresa Brewer, a 45 of the Brown’s “I Heard the Bluebirds Sing” and old 78s of a Nun’s Choir.
My first apartment consisted of a large carpet, an over-turned laundry basket for a tv stand and an old color television that took forever to warm up. Cable was still something rich people had.
Now we have an almost unlimited number of television choices, Netflix, YouTube, iTunes, Facebook, millions of blogs and we’re always craving to see what else is on. We hardly get through one song on a playlist when we’re itching to switch to the next track. I shudder to think of how many movies get watched only halfway on the Netflix before the clicker is in hand, searching for something more stimulating. I suspect about half of my readers only got this far on this post before clicking off and reading the next article in their RSS reader.
We’ve spent the past ten years of so building rapid distribution systems that shove content at us faster than we can consume it. Judging from my NetFlix queue and iTunes list, I think we are fast approaching that point when we have caught up with consuming all the older, quality content we missed on the way to getting older. And the current selection of content is thinning.
Making distribution systems is easy. The creation of content still takes the same amount of time. You can’t rush human inspiration and creativity. It still takes time to work through a story line and character development. Editing a quality piece of writing takes time. Shooting video is a linear process. So is editing. The “good enough” rarely is. “Good enough” is code for a user will click off at :16 instead of 1:38.
We live now in the land of plenty where lots of people are creating more stuff in record time than at any other point in history. I wonder how much of it is good enough to savor, crave more or last beyond the next fashion season.
Today’s post is a guest post by the novelist and essayist, Jane Devin. We’re delighted she stopped by to bark and walk in our back yard and welcome her any time she wants to wander in. If you haven’t already, buy her book, Elephant Girl. It is nothing short of amazing.
Earlier this month, a YouTube video of a fed-up father who shot up his daughter’s laptop after she posted a disrespectful letter about her parents on Facebook went viral on the internet. This is the video:
A few words up front: I was not a perfect parent and sometimes not even an adequate one. I don’t know Mr. Jordan or his daughter well enough to speak to their true characters, intentions, or their family dynamics.
What I do know is what Mr. Jordan chose to make public. First, his 15 year old daughter wrote a scathing post against her parents which many people, including me, thought made her sound like an entitled brat. She posted it on Facebook and her dad found it through their dog’s account (seriously). Second, Mr. Jordan decided to teach Hannah a lesson by posting a video to her Facebook wall. After going off on his own diatribe, which I found not too horrible (hey, parents are people, too — our feelings get hurt and we don’t appreciate being disrespected,) Mr. Jordan decided to put several rounds of bullets into his daughter’s computer. That’s where his family drama became ugly for me.
A majority of parents (and by my count mostly women), lauded Mr. Jordan with praises like, “It’s great to see someone actually parent” and “The brat got what she deserved – I bet she won’t dare act that way again”. It takes a lot to shock me, but these kind of comments did. Here’s why:
1) If it was any other authoritarian relationship — say, employee/employer, teacher/student — people would have been up in arms over the destruction of property in order to teach a lesson, not applauding the act. If someone provided a computer to their employee or student and then shot it up when they found them abusing it, most of us would think they were nuts, even if they did pay for what they destroyed. We wouldn’t be praising the “lesson” they were teaching.
2) The “lesson” that it’s somehow okay to destroy someone’s property when you feel disrespected, even if it’s something you bought as a gift, teaches that destruction and revenge are appropriate responses. It seems to me that a lot of people who grow up with that lesson are the same ones who do things like slash the tires of their boyfriend’s car when they find out he wasn’t faithful.
3) The definition of vandalism is “deliberate, mischievous, or malicious destruction of public or private property.” The law may have given the father the right to control his daughter’s use of property, and he could argue that the property was ultimately a gift he bought and then reclaimed, but the spirit of vandalism remains. He deliberately and maliciously destroyed something even he admitted was his daughter’s.
4) Discipline and revenge are not the same thing. That’s why comments like “finally, a parent acting like a parent” stunned me. Since when is an act of vengeance the same as discipline? While I understand people’s frustration with kids who are spoiled or act “entitled” I fail to see how shooting up a child’s possessions can, in any way, be considered good parenting or intelligent discipline.
5) The public doesn’t know, can’t know, both sides of the story. The dad said his daughter was grounded for three months before for doing something “similar” and “stupid.” To those who say the girl was previously spoiled and therefore needed a harsh reminder of her place, I’d counter that a three month restriction seems pretty drastic and not lax at all. A quarter of a year is a long time in the life of a teen — and there are few teenagers who don’t repeat their mistakes. And that list of chores? How long did they take in reality? Did the girl also work at her stepmom’s business, as she claimed? Was she given adequate time outside of school to be a kid? We don’t know. While the girl’s letter was nasty — I especially took exception to the “cleaning lady” bit — maybe she had her own and possibly legitimate reasons for being frustrated.
6) Like Hannah’s father, I also left home at 16. I was mostly self-supporting by the age of 14. I don’t think it made me a better or more responsible person, and I would not wish that kind of necessary but early independence on any teenager. I have no problem with a 15 year old having a part-time job, but unlike Hannah’s dad I don’t view it as a requirement. I think a child’s primary job is to go to school. I think learning social skills and having friends and activities is also important. There’s plenty of time and occasions in life to go to work at Burger King for minimum wage. At 15, I think a job should be a choice, not a condition of living happily under your parent’s roof.
7) Another viral YouTube video was that of a judge who was shown spanking and yelling at his then-teenage daughter for being disobedient. He had told her not to download music from the internet and she did. The majority of parents condemned the judge for his abuse, which was blatant and easy to see. Almost no one in that case called the girl a spoiled brat or praised the judge for his parenting skills. Yet Mr. Jordan was lauded for shaming his daughter publicly by posting his video on Facebook and YouTube — an act that will have consequences for her years into the future — and for taking a gun to his daughter’s property in order to prove that he was the man in charge. The hallmarks of domestic violence are not always physical. The six signs of an abuser are: Dominance, Humiliation, Isolation, Threats, Intimidation, Denial and Blame. Again, I do not know Mr. Jordan outside of what he has made public, but I see all six signs in the behavior exhibited in his video. He asserted his dominance, humiliated his daughter, promised to isolate her through restriction, threatened her with promises that her life was about to get “a whole lot harder,” intimidated her by showing her his power, denied that she had any right to complain, and then blamed her for his own overreaction, which was to put several rounds of ammunition into her property. I do not see much of a moral difference between the physical abuse of the judge and what Mr. Jordan did. Both men showed a lack of self-control and used their power wrongly. To condemn one while praising the other is, to me, hypocritical at best.
I believe in discipline. I don’t believe in destruction. I believe that good parents have a right to demand respect. I don’t believe respect is achieved through acts of violence. I believe children should know that their parents are human and can get angry and have hurt feelings just like anyone else — but I think it’s a parent’s job to model an appropriate way to deal with frustration. The use of a gun to make a point is never appropriate. Ever. That many people think it is — that the majority of comments praise Mr. Jordan — doesn’t make him, or the majority, right.
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