Scattershot

The "the" mystery

How did "all of a sudden" morph into "all of the sudden?" It's a mystery that fascinates and irritates me. When I hear the phrase spoken these days, I hear "all of the sudden" about 80% of the time. When I see it written, it is always "all of a sudden."

      Years ago, a native English speaker would never have said "all of the sudden." Now it's common. How did that "the" sneak into the idiom? Are people perhaps unconsciously mimicking "all of the time," for example? Or what? I simply can't come up with an explanation.

    And what's next? Will it soon be "once upon the time?" "Shake the leg"? ""The mile the minute"? "The good head on his shoulders"? (Maybe a bad head is waiting in the closet at home...)

    A couple of nights ago at a play, I heard a character—a writer—say "all of the sudden." I don't for a minute believe that the author of the play put those words in a writer's mouth. The actor, I am sure, substituted what came to her most naturally, and that, sadly, was "all of the sudden." (Maybe someone told the actor to "break the leg" before she went on...)

    If articles can float about so freely, our language may be in for a good deal of change. Maybe we'll soon be saying, "She is the ham" or "He can't cut a mustard." (Will he still be able to cut the cheese, though?) Will someone "hit a sack" or "get off on a wrong foot" or feel "under a weather"?

   I guess a proof will be in a pudding.

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Seven strong aunts

The photo above is one of my favorites. It shows my seven aunts sitting together in, I would guess, the 1940s. All but one of them look dressed up, most likely in clothes they made themselves. 

    Only Aunt Lydia and Aunt Ann are still living, the two on the far right. Their little brother is my dad. He was the youngest in his large German-American family (Germans from Russia, for those familiar with that term.) Seven older sisters—can you imagine? My two younger brothers would likely call that hell on earth.

    Though I didn't know all the aunts well, the thing I always noticed about them, even as a child, was how strong they were. They would love us and pinch our cheeks hard with affection and feed us until we popped, but there was never any question that if they said, "Jump!" we were to jump. Now! These women ran things. They brooked no nonsense. They were efficient, smart, accomplished women who slipped effortlessly into German when they didn't want us to understand them. (I knew I was an adult, when 20 years ago or so, Aunt Kate finally told me what a certain word meant—the word no one would tell me the meaning of as a child. It was "asshole.") 

     Of the two living aunts, one is in her nineties and still living on her own, and the other is living with her husband in the house they've owned for 50 or 60 years. At my dad's 80th birthday party a couple of years ago, Aunt Lydia told me the secret to longevity: Live in a house with stairs (going up and down them will keep you fit) and have something you love to do in your life.

      Sounds pretty smart to me.

Spanx bewilderment

Someone needs to explain Spanx to me. Clearly, I'm missing something fundamental. Or perhaps I should say "foundational." I received a Spanx catalog in the mail today, and, as usual, I paged through it, baffled.

    For the uninitiated, Spanx are described as "bodyshapers, foundations, slimming intimates." Hey, I'm into "slimming," so I ordered an item a couple of years ago. I'd heard that Spanx are great to wear under pants so that you have no panty line.

    I couldn't get the "Mid-Thigh Smoother" on my body anywhere near where it was supposed to be. I just stood in the bedroom laughing as it dangled, knee-high, around one leg.

    Not to be defeated, I put my problem-solving skills to work. "If my usual size medium is clearly not wearable, I'll order something even larger than an extra large--a 2X," I decided. Since I'm not remotely close to being a size 2X person, I figured I would have the advantage of no panty line in something so large that (a) I could get it on and (b) it would be comfortable. 

    Well, (a) I did manage to get it on but (b) it was not at all comfortable. Even worse, there was what I call the "squish displacement" problem. If you squeeze your body into a Mid-Thigh Smoother, what you're squishing has to come out somewhere, does it not? It's not going to retreat inward, dissolving into your bones. No, it's going to spill out the top of your Mid-Thigh Smoother, forming a lovely little roll around your middle. Not good. And I shudder to think of what happens when you put on the "Shaping Mid-Thigh Bodysuit" or the "Hi-Rise Panty with Thong Back."

    In the catalog pictures, there is no squish displacement. But that's because the models are all size 2, tops. They have no need whatsoever for slimming intimates, so everything looks good. Very good.

    What, oh what, am I missing? Why, oh why, do women love their Spanx? I know they do. I just don't see why.

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"Thangs" to remember

The news today presents English teachers with an idea to motivate their students: If you want to become a criminal, learning to write well can help you be successful.

    It seems that poor writing skills were the downfall of West Virginian Matthew Don Reed. He was impersonating the governor and trying to steal personal information from job seekers. The problem is, the letter he sent out was full of grammar and spelling mistakes. An excerpt:

    It's nice to have you as an employee of West Virginia. your super (boss) Matt talk a lot of thangs about you. I hope you stay with us a long time. If you got ? please ask Matt.

    What an opportunity for teachers! When students scoff at a teacher's insistence that they actually spell words out instead of using text messaging abbreviations, the teacher has Matthew Don Reed as an example of the danger of shortcuts. When a teacher insists students learn those pesky punctuation and grammar rules and the kids say, "How come we have to learn this stuff?!!!!," one answer might be, "to keep you out of prison."

    Hey, appealing to their better natures doesn't always work. It's good to have options.

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Julie and Julia—My Year of Cooking Dangerously

I have not yet seen the movie Julie and Julia, but I just finished the book and was going to say how much I enjoyed it. But then I decided to take a look at the Amazon reviews first.

My goodness. People really hate this book. Or at least an awful lot of them do. Interestingly, the most recent reviews (the ones that show up first) are from reviewers who hate it the most. Toward the end of the 450 reviews, the reviewers are much more positive.

I can't help but wonder what's going on. Are at least some of the haters people who expected the book to be like the movie, which it is not? (I was warned by a book store clerk that, "Just so you know, it does not contain Julia's viewpoint, like the movie does," so maybe there had been complaints.)

I know that part of the problem is the language. If you are the kind of person who faints at the sight of the "f" word, definitely skip the book. She tosses that word around with abandon.

But if you can get past that and can appreciate funny, sardonic writing, it's a hoot. Sometimes, in fact, I thought her writing quite amazing and found myself studying her technique. She does have a way with detail and an ability to take what should be boring—following a recipe, for example—and make it interesting. I love the way she makes people seem so real, and I love the whole idea of her project. (Stuck in a dead-end job and approaching 30, she decided, on a whim, to tackle every one of Julia Child's recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, in one year, writing about the experience in a blog. This was not a project for the faint of heart, and she eventually received quite a lot of media attention, as well as many cyberspace followers.)

Well, I liked the book a lot. But if Amazon reviewers are any judge of my taste, I have none.

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Ear power

Walking around San Francisco last week, traveling on BART, and observing people, I started imagining that any alien beings who might be watching us would decide that human beings are powered by cords plugged into their ears. Everyone, it seemed, was shutting out the world with an mp3 player.

    When you think of people as battery-powered beings, the world looks different. That guy rocking to music only he could hear? Must be a power surge. The person nodding off on BART? Dead battery. The person snoozing on a bench without a power cord in his ear? Disconnected.

    There's probably a reason I get lost a lot in a city. Or a town. Or anywhere. It's probably wiser to pay attention to signs and landmarks than to how alien observers might interpret our world.

Being "nice"

My friend Elaine called recently, exuberant about having just heard teacher Rafe Esquith speak at a bookstore in her area. Esquith is the author of Teach Like Your Hair's on Fire, a book I loved and commented on in a blog a couple of years ago. Now he has a new book, Lighting Their Fires. According to my friend, Esquith said that one of the things he teaches his kids is to "be nice."

    I've been thinking a lot about the word "nice" lately. It's a word that has lost a lot of its luster in today's society. Imagine you're being set up for a blind date and the prospective date is described as "nice." That little word can be the kiss of death to some people, who might prefer "hot" or "brilliant" or "funny." But "nice"? It all too often translates as "boring."

   When I was young, "nice" was a good thing to be. And then, somehow, it became associated with being wimpy, passive, and/or old-fashioned. Women took assertiveness classes to learn to stick up for themselves and be more aggressive. "Respectfulness" took a lower place in qualities parents impressed upon kids as important. Standing up for yourself, demanding your rights, and getting what you want became more and more important, and never mind rudeness or stepping on others' toes. Aggression became a quality much more admired, at least when it got results.

    Maybe that's why I find Esquith's emphasis on "being nice" to be refreshing. He makes demands of his students, he pushes them to do their best, and he has high expectations--yet he remembers to teach them that being nice is necessary and important. Most of us know what "being nice" means, without defining it. If pushed, we might say that it involves being kind, being aware of others and their feelings, and realizing that each of us is not the center of the universe and cannot always have what we want when we want it. I often think we'd all be a lot better off if "niceness" rose much nearer the top of qualities admired and cultivated by Americans.

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