Scattershot

Snooty spelling gene

I was born with a snooty spelling gene. As a child, I wasn't exactly prone to feeling confident about anything, but when it came to spelling, well, things were different. I was good at spelling. 

    In fifth grade, I laughed scornfully to myself during a spelling bee when the boy before me forgot the "n" at the end of "hymn." I was up next. "H-i-m-n," I said. In my proud eagerness to show that I knew about that silent "n" at the end, I had forgotten the "y." I felt utterly humiliated.

    In seventh grade, I—a girl who never said "boo" in class—raised my hand in homeroom to show the teacher the error in my spelling book. "Parliament" had an "a" in it in the book, and I was sure it didn't have an "a."

    I was wrong. Humiliation again. (In that same homeroom class, I also remember taking a spelling test, writing down the word after the teacher pronounced it, and hesitating, wondering if I had it right. I accidentally—really, it was accidentally— glanced over at Virginia Mason's paper and saw she had written it the same way I had. I knew then that we were right. But was that cheating? I decided it was. As punishment, I erased my word and spelled it wrong on purpose, as penance. Right and wrong was very clear to me in those days.)

    When I became an English teacher years later, I figured out ways to teach everything English teachers need to teach, except for one thing: spelling. I never found a way to do that successfully. It always seemed to me that kids had a feel for spelling, or they did not. The good spellers did well on spelling tests. The bad spellers did not. Nothing much helped the bad spellers.

    I was mystified because I can't imagine struggling with spelling. If someone asks me how to spell a word, I'll say, "I think it's like this," and then rattle off the first thing that comes to me. It's almost always right. I say this modestly, as I have nothing to do with this talent, if it is a talent. I just, somehow, know. The letters "appear" in my brain. (Okay, sometimes they appear wrong, but at least they show up. I think, for bad spellers, they don't show up at all.)

    I've been thinking about spelling because I caught the last half hour of the National Spelling Bee on television last night. My snooty spelling gene was humbled. It is a pale imitation of whatever genes these kids have been nurturing.     

    And yet I found myself thinking, "What the heck is the point here? Why spend all the hours and hours they have spent learning to spell words that no one, in a lifetime, ever needs to spell? How are they ever going to use that skill?"

    Then I rethought my position. Why does a kid spend hours and hours learning to shoot baskets? Or play the drums? Or kick field goals? Or draw cartoons? Maybe it's to be good at something, to enjoy a feeling of accomplishment, to learn discipline, to be proud of themselves. Does it really matter if it's not something they will "use" in later life? Does it really matter what it is?

    I don't think so. I congratulate these kids for becoming the best at something, for having the courage to try, for having the cool presence of mind to get up on a stage in front of millions and do something hard.

    Wow.

Blind spots

We all have our blind spots when it comes to language. One of the smartest women I know frequently uses "irregardless." Someone else frequently puts a "t" at the end of "across." Someone else says things like, "He come to class late." Someone else says, "She has ate."

    And yesterday I discovered one of my own blind spots. A Cottonwood Press author came in to the office late yesterday and was chatting with the two of us still there. At some point, I happened to utter this sentence:  "I drug it out to take a look."

    The author pounced. "Ooooh.....Did I just hear Cranky Language Lady say 'drug' instead of 'dragged'?"

    I was puzzled. "I drug it out" sounded absolutely fine to me. I couldn't believe that it wasn't a perfectly proper alternative to "dragged." I got out the dictionary.

    It isn't.

    I am duly humiliated. I am shocked to learn I have been using a word wrong all my life. I keep thinking, "How could I have missed this? How can 'I drug' sound so right to me?"

    As I said, we all have our blind spots. In my embarrassment, I did manage to take the high road and refrain from reminding the author of some of her past issues involving commas. I am always tactful to a fault.

    But her initials are V.H.

E-mail pain

First let me say that I absolutely love e-mail. It's fast. It's easy. It makes many kinds of communication so much more efficient than a phone call. ("What's the date of your party again?" and a quick reply: "Saturday, June 13." instead of "Hi. May I speak to your mom?.......Okay. When do you think she'll be back?.....Would you take a message then?........Well, could you maybe write it on your hand like you do your homework......?"

    That said, I've had a bad e-mail week. I had to e-mail several business people I deal with about entirely different matters. In each case, I knew that the issue was going to be a bit confusing, so in each case I worded my question VERY carefully. I know I was clear. I know I was accurate. I know I was specific.

    And in each case, what happened was exactly what I had been afraid would happen: The person opened the e-mail, glanced at it, and answered what he or she thought I was asking, not what I actually asked.

    I really, really, really hate that. It's often hard to know how to proceed.

    The worst, of course, is computer software help lines. I'll say something like, "Every time I hit the letter 'Q,' your program shuts down. There is no error message. It simply quits. What can I do to fix this problem?"

    I'll get a response along these lines: "Please to help with assistance, Mr. Cherly. Questions must aks frist. Please to tell me the DXQ of your DAT in the molybadium. And please to attack the complete bounce including the full message headers on the massage, along with the transient delivery information from the Cornext sector."

    Only once, ever, have I received a completely literate and really helpful reply from a software help line. (Kudos to Quick Books!)

    After ranting last night to a friend about my bad e-mail week, I opened up a new e-mail this morning from one of my bad responders. Completely on her own, she had decided that she should e-mail me a more complete response than she had yesterday. And this time, she got it right. Exactly right!

    There is hope.

Kiwi talk

When my husband and I stopped in at a bakery in New Zealand last week to see what time it opened for breakfast, the woman said, "Oh, nine-ish. And then we'll have pink lips and such."

    My husband smiled and nodded and told her we would see her in the morning. "What the heck are pink lips?" I said as soon as we got outside. He rolled his eyes, realizing that, once more, I had not understood a Kiwi speaker.

    "Pancakes," he said. "She said pancakes."

    I honestly thought she'd said "pink lips." She pronounced it more like "pinkicks," but I somehow heard an "l" in there as well.

    I have a lot of trouble understanding people in New Zealand. I blame it on the vowels, mostly. The sounds are all turned around there, from a U.S. perspective. For example, the long "a" sound is generally pronounced as a long "i." The short "e" is pronounced as a short "i" in the U.S. Thus, a "game of chess" becomes "a gime of chiss." A "pebble" is a "pibble." "Time of day" becomes "time of die."

   Or maybe "Tom of die." The long "i" sometimes sounds like the "o" in "mop."

    The long "e" often sounds like a long "a," so "Would you like a cup of tea?" sounds like, "Would you lock a cuppa tay?"

   While we were in New Zealand, I loved listening to the differences, but I have to admit that half the time I didn't have any idea what people were saying. (Not a figure of speech. I really mean half the time.) My husband, luckily, had little trouble. He became my translator.

  It's a good thing. Without him, I would have wandered about puzzled most of the time, or spent needless time worrying about eating things like pink lips.

(One of the many enormous trees in the botanic gardens in Christchurch)

No Cussing Club

A fourteen-year-old boy who started the "No Cussing Club" has been in the news lately. I got quite a kick out of hearing him interviewed on National Public Radio yesterday. Take a look at his web site and the number of people across the country who have joined his movement.

    Cussing is an interesting language phenomenon, and people's reactions to it are interesting as well. People in my town are all in a tizzy about kids in the high school International Baccalaureate program reading a book that has some words they find offensive. That attitude makes me crazy. It's a little like looking at a bountiful and delicious Thanksgiving dinner and rejecting it entirely because you don't like pecans on your sweet potatoes.

    Cussing in context doesn't really bother me. Some foul language in a movie or book about the horrors of war, for example, seems realistic. A choice word uttered when someone slams his hand in the door does not offend me.

    What offends me is people who use swear words indiscriminately, without thought, without regard to where they are or who they are with, who sprinkle the "f" word liberally into conversations about anything and everything. Then it isn't the words that offend me so much as the attitude of the people using them.

    What the words indicate to me is selfishness, a disregard for others, an "I'm so important that I can say whatever I want, whenever I want" attitude. It indicates a total lack of respect for the feelings or sensibilities of anyone else.

    They also indicate a laziness and lack of respect regarding language. Do the "cussers" not know other words? Can they not be bothered to think? Are their vocabularies so lacking that they use the "f" word as a verb, as an adjective, as an interjection, as an anything at all—thus stripping the word of much meaning?

    I think the "No Cussing Club" just might be onto something worth exploring.

Words are catching

I'm intrigued by how people copy language habits, quirks, and phrases from one another, often unconsciously. For example, my nephew sometimes say "dang."  It always makes me smile inside because it's such an old-fashioned word to be coming out of a young person's mouth. Yet after I've spent some time around him, I'll find myself using "dang," too. Normally, it's not in my vocabulary.

    The other day, I heard someone say "dadgummit," and it just tickled me. ("Tickled" also seems rather old-fashioned.) I hadn't heard "dadgummit" in years, and it's been running through my brain ever since. I won't be surprised if it pops out of my mouth sometime soon. (My mom used to say it sometimes, but her favorite utterance when she was upset was simply, "Cussword!" I love that.)

    A woman I know almost always says "as well" instead of "also" or "too"--as In "I would like to go as well." Not surprisingly, her boyfriend has started saying "as well" as well!  When I was in high school, a girl named Joy pronounced "really" (reeeeely) as "rilly." I remember thinking that was odd. But before long, pretty much everyone was saying "rilly," including me. (Maybe Joy's popularity had something to do with it.)

    My husband says "just a scosh," meaning "just a little," and now I say it, too. (I have no idea how to spell "scosh" and can't find it in my dictionary.) And many people I have known since my twenties use the word "freebish," popularized by one of our crowd in those days.

    Another friend has a habit of replying in short sentences instead of saying "Yes." For example, if you say, "Would you like to go to dinner tomorrow?" she will say, "I would" instead of "Yes." If you say, "Did you get that package in the mail?" she will answer, "I did." If you say, "Have you ever figured out that computer problem?" she will say, "I have." It's not at all surprising that I find her little five-year-old daughter answering questions in the same way.

    Do I find that interesting? I do.

 



   

Mystifying behavior with names

A couple of nights ago, my husband and I went into a local pub to grab a bite to eat. A waiter we've talked to in the past, the distant past, waved to us. Without missing a beat, my husband called, "Hi, Jamison."

    I couldn't believe he'd come up with the guy's name. Then he nodded to a waitress. "Hi, Melody," he said.

    This happens all the time. The man seems to know the name of every waiter, waitress, or bartender who's every waited on us anywhere in town. This would not be so amazing if he weren't the same man who fails, at least 50% of the time, to introduce me to people we run into from his workplace. Though he may have worked with them for 20 years, he often can't remember their names, and I have to introduce myself.

    He is also the same man who once encountered one of my employees at the mall and had no idea who she was when she spoke to him. She had worked for me for seven years, and he had met her countless times, both at the office and at parties, and at that point he may even have attended her wedding. Yet the best he could come up with when he later told me about the encounter was, "I think she might have been someone who has worked for you sometime."

    Sigh.

    I wonder if the "waiter/waitress" part of his brain is over-developed or something. Or maybe it's just that his brain perks up and pays more attention when he's dealing with people bringing him food and drink, rather than memos or jobs to do. In any case, this strange ability of his never fails to amaze me.

Englishiness

All graphic artists who have worked for Cottonwood Press have hated me. Well, not me personally, but my "Englishiness." (If Stephen Colbert can use "truthiness," I can use "Englishiness.") An artist will spend hours on a cover design that is beautiful but in doing so randomly capitalize letters simply because some letters "look better" in her design than others. I will make her change it, thus ruining the design—at least in her mind. Or she will think she is finished with something, only to have me, or others on staff, point out picky little punctuation errors.

     It's annoying, I know, but when you are selling materials to English teachers, you need to be even more careful than usual. English teachers can be a picky bunch.

     I know. I encountered one just this week. A very nice blog reader named Arleta kindly pointed out that I had written "dread" instead of "dreaded." I thought I had written "dreaded," but I obviously had not. I wrote back to her and thanked her for correcting my mistake. However, just as my email spell check was highlighting the word "appreciate" as spelled wrong, I simultaneously hit "send." Oops. I had to send Arleta another email acknowledging that mistake so that she didn't have to email me again. She probably thinks I'm an idiot.

     My lawyer is a stickler for grammar and punctuation, too, and he delights in catching me in an error. (He also has never gotten over the fact that I corrected  him on a quotation mark/comma issue once and, when he didn't believe me, proved my "rightness" by showing him pages in Chicago Manual of Style and several grammar books. Now every time he uses a quotation mark, it is followed by the words: Note correct use of comma.)

     What's really hard is encountering someone who "corrects" what really isn't wrong. It's happened to me when I'm selling books at a conference. A customer will point out an "error" that isn't really an error at all. It's hard to diplomatically correct someone who is proud of some esoteric, and incorrect, bit of knowledge—especially if you're trying to sell him something.

     "Englishiness" is hard sometimes.

Grammar Girl

I've begun seeing Grammar Girl everywhere. Author Mignon Fogarty has podcasts, CDs, and her best-selling book, Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing. I was pretty skeptical. I've seen so many books that take a rather snooty or unrealistic view of language, and I suspected this would be another one.

     But I bought a copy anyway. I'm glad I did. I'm only halfway through it, but I'm pretty impressed. The book is readable, practical, and a great refresher course for anyone who can't remember all that stuff taught in English classes. One thing I particularly like is her understanding that language changes, and hard and fast rules don't stay hard and fast forever.

      I'm not wild about many of her hints for remembering things because they often just don't make a lot of sense to me. However, it may be that they work well for others. (It could be that my brain is just wired differently.) I like the way the book is divided into little chunks that address specific issues. There's only so much anyone can absorb at one time about grammar, after all. Her tone is conversational, and she has a sense of humor, too. All in all, it's a good buy for anyone who ever has questions about writing and the "correct" way to do things.

 

Language and music

One of Charles Darwin's speculations was that music might have come before language. Many species use song for sexual display, so perhaps humans did, too. Maybe those first vocalizations were later applied to topics such as basics of survival and then became more varied and complex.

     A fascinating Discover magazine column by Jaron Lanier takes a look at music and its relationship to language. Sing a Song of Evolution points out that language "might not have entirely escaped its origins. Since you can be understood even when you are not well-spoken, why bother being well-spoken at all?...Perhaps speaking well is still, in part, a form of sexual display. By being well-spoken I show not only that I am a clued-in member of the tribe but also that I am intelligent and likely to be a successful partner and helpful mate."

     So maybe, when students in an English class start complaining, "How come we have to learn this stuff?", we ought to tell them it will make them more attractive to the opposite sex. Now that would be a reason they might take seriously!