Adult or Grown-up?
Anyway Double Pneumonia Fraternity or frat? FreshlingPathePro'ly Problematic Pronouns Quotation marks vs. Italics Skeam Ten times (variable) than the sun "To go" verbs beginning with "sc"
Who and whom
I have observed, maybe as an ageist, that children tend to call adults "grown-ups"
and that adults call each other "adults" but refer to themselves as
"grown-ups" to children. Finally I realized why. Grown-ups, particularly
the subgroup "parents," don't like to fly kites or bathe with a rubber
ducky, and they do take it in hand to teach children to fear being individual.
Unique behavior and thought threatens average grown-ups because they know embarrassment
(is that what was really in the apple?) and they fret about what people might
think. An adult isn't necessarily a grown-up--at least not all the time. Being
an adult only means no longer a child. Some parents think they're obliged to
coax a child into grown-upness, not into individuality, which attempt is wretched.
And some children are born grown-ups, which is also sad. If you survive to 18,
you might be an adult, but you can always stop being a grown-up (and when you've
turned 18 you're not legally required to do what your parents tell you to do
anymore anyway, so you don't even have to be a grown-up). It's never
too late to have a happy childhood. Anyway, with these two terms I distinguish
between being physically or legally mature and being brain-dead.
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One of the most useful words I know. Most frequently I employ it to justify
tangents within paragraphs and paragraphs following one another completely without
transition and to alert the attentive reader that whatever follows might tie
up an earlier--possibly much earlier--loose end. Also as an avoidance tactic,
to close a subject suddenly without conclusion. One of my favorite Blues Traveler
songs, "But Anyway," relies on this most useful word for these protean
qualities.
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Camel-Toe
A phenomenon achieved in women wearing too-tight stretch-pants or stretchy shorts, particularly without underwear. The fabric clings to either side of the pubic bone with its padding, and the seam of the rise aims for the crotch. The overall appearance of this bodily region is that of a camel's foot. This is, if you wondered, not a complimentary term. As far as I know, BHM coined it, which makes sense: he found the female body too distasteful for ordinary words and therefore had to invent his own terms.
Cancer Bra
An unkind phrase referring to the effect of wearing a too-small bra that makes a woman look like she has a lump in each breast. An effect of demi-cup bras and also seen in women who don't want to admit to needing to step up a cup size.
Deliberate Misspellings
A story is a tale; a storey is a layer of a building, at least in British English. A useful distinction.
A conversational phenomenon of someone CLH and I grew up with. If you mentioned your slight cold to her, she would immediately counter with her own double pneumonia. Self-centeredness, rudeness, hypochondria. Whatever.
I knew nothing about "Greek" clubs until I arrived at UConn, when
I soon learned many and only bad things about them. That impression continued
until the summer after sophomore year when DEDBG
and I rented a room from the MIT chapter of Sigma Chi. There we learned why
a fraternity is so named. We had never experienced any brotherhood at UConn.
DEDBG brought one of the brothers home one weekend and while there, Joe wanted
to visit the UConn Sigma Chi. He was shocked by the filth of the house, the
lack of camaraderie, and particularly how unfriendly, unwelcoming, how unbrotherly
the men he met were. Finally he understood why DEDBG and I thought what we did when
we arrived. When I mean frat I say "frat"; when I mean fraternity
I say "fraternity."
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Freshling! It's Saxon! It's pithy! It doesn't sound so "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut" as "frosh"! It's my new word! Sadly, I didn't coin it.
"Frosh" always sounded stupid, but I found it superior to its two
synonyms, "freshman" and "first-year student." "Freshman"
is sexist. Have you noticed that some journalists still use the term "coed"
to mean "female college student," harking back to the first days of
women intruding onto formerly all-male campuses? And "first-year student"
is a ridiculous excess of nonsexist speech. Have you noticed that The Elements
of Non-Sexist Usage encourages blanket use of the passive voice to avoid
single-sex-ergo-sexist construction? "Frosh," though goofy
(RDC hates it) is nonsexist (though derived
from a sexist word), short, and thoroughly Anglo-Saxon. And so is "freshling"!
Why supporters of inclusive language have encouraged Latinate instead of
Saxon constructions I don't know. Too damn many syllables. Furthermore, the
term "first-year student" ignores a key point: by slacking off, many
students return to their second year of school without achieving sophomore standing.
"Freshman" and thus "frosh" mean a level of credits whereas
"first-year student" has a much narrower denotation of calendar time.
I can also gripe at length about my theories on "dormitory,"
a place to sleep; "dorm," a cool place to live on campus at school
where you sleep, study, make love, hang out, and generally live; and "residence
hall," a too damn long, formal, false-sounding invention that fails even
to denote all the spirit of what "dorm" connotes.
I haven't decided about "freshman" Congress members. Can't call them
"first-year," but "first-term" is perfectly appropriate
and true. Usually they're called "Representatives" or "Senators"
whereas college students are much more often classified by semester standing.
"Frosh" is too collegiate. Aha! But freshling is perfect for
members of Congress too. Sigh.
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Short for "pathetic," when there is so much in your freshling world that must be so described.
A Mast-ism, an element of the idiolect of a UC history professor from whom I learned a lot more than Chinese history. I believe that with this pronunciation he mourned the passing of proper English. A lament from the long-lost and much more difficult days of his youth, when he had to walk uphill (both ways) in the snow (barefoot) carrying his lunch (when he had it) (and was therefore worse off than Lincoln).
Using "their" as the nonsexist singular third person is okay when
the referent is general or unknown or would, in French and Spanish and so on,
take the plural second "you." When the referent is clearly singular
or obviously unsexed, why not use "it"? It is already singular and
already neuter. Do we fear dehumanization? Perhaps if we behaved better, we
would fear dehumanization less.
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Strunk and White say movies should be italicized, <CITE>'d, etc.
So does David Sonstroem, UConn's own Strunk-and-White. So would have Fowler.
But I don't. I put short poems in quotes ("Ode on a Grecian Urn")
and long ones in italics (The Faerie Queene), and minor plays in quotes
("Arsenic and Old Lace") and major ones in italics (Hamlet),
which distinctions are arbitrary. Off the top of my head, I couldn't tell you
what I'd do with a minor Shakespeare (some would argue there is none) like "Timon
of Athens or A Winter's Tale." But except in Sonstroem's grammar
class, where I knew I'd be marked down and therefore sacrificed my logic (and
my integrity) for my grade, movies go in quotes, damn it, because they're often
based on books and how else do you distinguish between them? "A Room with
a View" is obviously Merchant/ Ivory, George Sands, Helena Bonham-Carter,
Daniel Day-Lewis, Rupert Graves, and Denholm Elliot. And A Room with a View
is obviously E.M. Forster's novel. Is that
so unreasonable of me?
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A contraction (with some subtraction and substitution) of "ice cream,"
which can mean any of many frozen desserts: actual ice cream (a rarity), ice
milk (even more of a rarity), frozen yogurt of any fat content, or sorbet.
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Ten times (variable) than the sun
In my least favorite dorm, the sadly appropriately named Hicks that was a mistake in my sophomore year, I suffered a lamp mounted on the dorm opposite that shone directly into my room; darkness was lost until I bought a length of black canvas. I was bitching about it at supper one night and described the bane of my existence as being ten times brighter than the sun. Not missing a beat, SEBB responded, "Amazing what they're doing with electricity nowadays."
"To go" verbs beginning with sc (usually)
The sound is sk, though. They're fun. It started in college, with MAF
or SLH shepherding us across Storrs
Road: "Scamper quickly, children!" Scamper, scurry, scarper, scuttle,
skedaddle.
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I am the only person I know, or certainly the only person under sixty, who
uses these words correctly in unrehearsed speech (or who cares to). The rule
is very simple: "who" is a subject pronoun; "whom" is an
object pronoun. I am a person who believes in good grammar. I am also a person
who loves my sister (subject pronoun), who is loved by my sister (passive subject),
whom my sister loves (object of subject's action).
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