During a discussion of students’ school performance, I brought up what I thought were salient points about what was expected back in the’50s as compared with today. What’s different? I mentioned that many public schools have dropped cursive writing.

What’s the big deal? The big deal is that cursive writing must have been invented to speed things up. Rather than composing each letter — and by necessity having to lift the pencil between each letter, as we do in printing — we link letters together by using cursive.

But it’s even more personal than that. My dad left us a Bible he used when he was 8, in 1911; the date, written cursively along with his signature, are great to behold. The gentle, flowing lines, varying in thickness as he pivoted the pen are impressive. Dad earned extra cash as a youngster in Wagon Mound by painting signs on buildings that still stand (the signs, if not the buildings).

On the menu today obviously are cell phones with a typing feature to allow the user to peck out a message. And what’s the usual message? It’s LOL, a phrase I won’t define here but instead suggest you ask any teen. Continue reading →

And why exactly can’t a person have his cake and eat it too? That expression bothered me for years, and I think I have the hang of it now.

As I alluded to in a column earlier this month, it’s difficult for people to agree on the meanings of terms we toss around, sometimes cavalierly.

For example, my friend and co-writer Lupita Gonzales says “having an ax to grind” refers to a person seeking a favor. That person carries a dull ax in hopes of getting it sharpened, free of charge.

As plausible as that rendition appears, a group of friends and relatives I visited during a recent occasion, insisted that the ax handler wants to settle a score and carries the tool for protection, or to inflict some damage.

The safest thing to do is to look in reference works. But guess what: The sources I checked posit both interpretations, so we’re no farther ahead. Continue reading →

In the same way that the Dallas Cowboys are “the team America loves to hate,” my older brother, Severino instilled that feeling in me long before I’d even heard of that pro team from Texas.

I spent my pre-teens dreaming up diabolical schemes to get even.
Some quirk made me grow to the same size as my brother — older than I by three years — long before I was 10. Once, we invested a whole penny in one of those wate-and-fate machines at Newberry’s or Murphey’s, received a printed card, noted the weight and divided by two. Let’s see: 152 pounds divided by 2 equals 76 pounds.

Though we were almost identical in size and height, I was no match for his strength. When he taunted me, I’d say, “You know, I’ve never run away from a fight with you,” and he’d answer, “and you’ve never won a fight with me either.” Continue reading →

Being the host family for a couple of Euros, my wife and I have needed to tone down our use of idioms. My dictionary defines an idiom as “a group of words established by usage as having meaning not deducible from those of the individual words.”

I believe a more acceptable definition would be an expression that on the surface doesn’t make sense. We refer to “carrying out the plan” when there’s no hint of hefting something out of a room. And we speak of fixing breakfast when nobody was aware of anything broken. Except maybe a fast.

Idioms tend to be accepted (although not always understood) in particular regions. Ana Granado and Phaedra Wouters, our exchange students from Spain and Belgium, respectively, will be with us until next June and thus will have plenty of opportunity to pick up a few idioms, expressions that mean something to some but generally don’t make sense even if we examine each word. And that makes most of these expressions, well, difficult to express.

Collectively, we call Ana and Phaedra our Euros, a convenient term for people who crossed the Atlantic and needed to learn idioms in a hurry. When I was chatting with a neighbor, one of the Euros asked what I’d been doing on the porch. “Oh, just shooting the breeze with my neighbor,” I said. Continue reading →

Once, around this time of year, my father-in-law, the late Stanley E. Coppock, asked me — I have no doubt whatsoever he was simply trying to humor me — what I’d like for Christmas. In the manner that we often traded barbs, I responded, “How about a partridge in a pear tree?”

That would have been a perfect gift. I like birds of all types, but I hadn’t the faintest notion as to where he could buy one. There are many considerations: price, availability, the ability to survive in New Mexico, and the aggressiveness of our cats, of which we had three, namely Fluffy, Tuffy and Liberace.

Stanley didn’t disappoint. Christmas morning, a tidy, wrapped gift with my name lay under the tree at my in-laws’ house. Although I assume a partridge is a small animal that doesn’t need huge volumes of air to survive, I was still concerned over the bird’s lack of air. I discovered something like I had asked for: a cartridge in a bare tree. At least the scansion would have pleased poets like e.e.cummings.

Stanley of course blamed the misunderstanding on a hearing aid malfunction. He had found a metal, springy thingy that once held bullets. It was wired to a dry twig, and thus the cartridge in a bare tree. I took it to work, when I was teaching, placed it on my desk and asked my students to identify the gift, under threat of a lowered grade for incorrect guesses. Continue reading →

A little teaser headline atop one of the “news” magazines that appear on people’s laptops shows an obviously contented Hillary Clinton. The text dubs that action of the presidential candidate as “laughing hysterically.”

All right. Now we have the essential elements that draw our attention, as the text goes on to explain — and try to make yet another connection: There’s implicit violence.

Here’s what happened: In a Q-and-A session, Hillary Clinton fielded a concern from a member of a small audience. The questioner, a middle-aged man, complained that after earning $1,000 for each of five jobs, he was terminated. He went on at length, lamenting his sudden unemployment and concluded with, “I feel like strangling Carly Fiorina,” a comment that generated scattered bits of nervous laughter among the 30-some members in that audience. The disgruntled member of the audience didn’t spell out his connection to Fiorina, a GOP aspirant for the U.S. Presidency and CEO of Hewlett-Packard. Continue reading →

NUREMBERG, Germany — It’s an eerie feeling, standing above the actual courtroom where possibly recent history’s most infamous trial took place. Through the years there have been attempts to keep the ‘40s structure suitable for visitors’ tours, but there’s evidence some of the improvements didn’t take place until possibly the past two decades.

We’re in Nuremberg, Germany (locals elide the “re” and pronounce it simply “Numberg,”) the site of a trial of some of history’s best-known operatives in World War II. In a trial that lasted months, of the dozen defendants, some were acquitted, some received mild sentences, some more severe punishment such as hangings, and others — like the greatest villain of modern times — Adolf Hitler, spared the government time and trouble by committing suicide.

Although we weren’t around in the ‘30s, many people know about conditions leading up to and away from WWII. Things were rationed; coupons, stingily doled out, enabled families in America to a modest amount of sugar, lard and flour. Once, in my pre-teen years, I recall being given a sip of coffee from Mom’s cup. I gagged one time when the spoonful of sugar suddenly had a familiar taste of — salt! Mom said that was the only condiment available that week, and she’d rather stir something into her coffee than nothing at all. Continue reading →

It’s unsettling to see so much unrest in an institution that has been dear to us. I watched a clip of a lot of tussling on the University of Missouri-Columbia campus at the time the university’s president, Tim Wolfe and a chancellor, R. Bowen Loftin, resigned their jobs in response to complaints by students at the mostly-white university.

The clincher, according to the media, came when some 30 black students threatened not to play in the Tigers’ football game against Brigham Young University. A boycott by the black athletes, which presumably would have forced the forfeiture of the game, would have cost Missouri a million dollars.

The athletes joined the boycott in response to complaints by other minorities at the campus who complained that complaints of racism were not being taken seriously by the upper administration at the 28,000-student university.

Disturbing also is the treatment of members of the press (yes, even the student press) by some of the protesters. An assistant professor in the mass media department seemed the most vocal in rallying fellow protestors against the press. (Does anyone get the irony here? The First Amendment is mostly about freedom of the press, and one of the school’s own faculty members leads the movement to physically remove a member of the press.) The young reporter, armed with a microphone, tried to explain his purpose and his presence. Continue reading →

It’s hard to imagine that years after a fiasco involving a television network that other geniuses would produce a rerun of that shameful act.

How many readers can recall the infamous “Heidi Game”? It took place in the fall of 1968 and involved two leading (at the time) National Football League teams, the Oakland Raiders and the New York Jets. There was a virtual rerun of the “Heidi Game” this past Sunday, although not quite of the magnitude of the one 47 years ago.

Let me explain:

In 1968, the Raiders trailed the Jets, 32-29 late in the game. Time was running out and network big shots were panicky over the probability that the length of the game would delay the start of other programing later that evening. In those days, experts say, football games seldom took longer than two and a half hours. But because of dropped passes, penalties, poundings and promos, this game took longer, and NBC executives decided to honor the promise to begin the Heidi special on time. Continue reading →

Arrrggg! That blasted password! For as long as I’ve paraded my technological ineptness, I’ve been cursed by the password, that brilliant invention designed to help people along but now behaves like a bank vault.

Seriously, does a password ever do anything but prevent the user — the poor sap who paid good money for the computer — from gaining access?

Wouldn’t it be great if we could come up with a single password for each application: for getting mail, for doing financial transactions, for playing games, for getting into Facebook?

As a solution, how about a game we used to play — I can’t recall its name, if it ever had one — but we called it “Getting Warmer.” Generally we kids would hide something from a classmate at Immaculate Conception School. It was fun until our homeroom teacher, Sister Mary Te Pego, deemed that the game was cruel and took advantage of others. Continue reading →