When I left high school teaching to take a university job, I expected things to be oh-so lofty. I imagined that every sentence among my colleagues would end with a Socratic allusion. I expected every conversation to be abstruse.
    Well, none of this happened. During a three-day faculty meeting at Ghost Ranch, the day I was hired, I called home to tell my wife that after a few beers, my co-workers made sure the same old jokes kept surfacing. I’d heard them 20 years earlier, I told my wife, “except that the joke tellers are using slightly bigger words.”

    Every joke I heard in my childhood, it seemed, got repeated at the faculty retreat. We heard about farmers’ daughters, jailbirds, three men entering a bar, and many variations of knock-knocks. But my brethren and sisteren merely cloaked the jokes in eloquent terminology.
    Now this isn’t to imply that university faculty sit around campfires getting drunk. They drink like anyone else, and I suspect it’s the preconception that their eggheadedness precludes anything other than pondering Plato or admiring Aristotle.
    Quickly, I noticed a speech mannerism that seemed to be contagious. One of the faculty members committed the sin of “the repeated ‘is.’”
    Here’s how:
    He’d say something like, “The thing is, is that we don’t have the resources.” Someone responded, “Then what you’re saying is, is that we need to give up.”
    It was almost as if, if the responder were imitating the first one.
    Soon, it seemed as if several of the dozen in our group imitated the speech pattern, or developed a stutter.
    Whenever I become aware of a strange way of handling the language, invariably, I hear it dozens of times that day, kind of like the “is, is” syndrome. I wonder whether the butchery has been going on forever, whether I just now became aware of it, or possibly whether the “is, is” user has just converted a host of followers sure to propagate such usage.
    Having been assigned English classes my first semester, I looked forward to helping cultivate the language of the masses. That desire got short-circuited when I heard a careless, endless chorus of “I could care less.”
    So common is that construction that we seldom hear the “correct” version, “couldn’t care less.” I once heard a bread commercial touting the nutrients of a special loaf, with the off-camera voice saying, “But Johnny could care.” Now in this case, the speaker omitted “less,” but the message nevertheless was that Johnny was indifferent.
    Remember, “could care less” means that the speaker apparently cares quite a bit and is therefore capable of caring less. But through abusage, we’ve modified the expression to mean just the opposite.
    One of the members of my department, whose excessive consumption of libations at Ghost Ranch caused him to tell a really off-color, scatological joke, told us the next morning, “I feel badly about telling that joke.”
    Someone tried to comfort him by blaming the booze. It’s as if the professor had been innocently standing there when alcoholic spirits wafted through the room and took him unawares. The other professor said, “I think your problem is, is that you have very little tolerance for liquor.”
    The joke-teller really didn’t feel badly, he simply felt bad. But that too is debatable. The professor’s head ached and he felt numb — and that’s why he may have felt badly. When you feel bad, you’re ill or remorseful. When you feel badly, your feelers aren’t working properly.
    Then, our over-consuming colleague, nursing a giant hangover, ran to the nearest porcelain altar, saying, “I’m nauseous.”
    But “nauseous” says more about the person’s character and behavior than what’s going on in his stomach. Should we language purists have corrected him by explaining how he misused that word too?
    “Nauseated” means “I’m gonna be sick.” “Nauseous” means “You make me sick.”
    But let’s end this game of linguistic checkers, lest some readers declare that they could care less about English usage.