At the outset, the disclosure is that I try to write more and more about less and less.

But at this rate, soon I’ll be writing everything about nothing. A quick survey of previous columns reveals such narrow topics as the word “so,” as it becomes “so-oo”; the overuse of the word “like”; and even the “f-word,” which appears with great frequency and rapidity in rap music.

One recent column exploited the west Texas way of raising an inflection at the end of certain words to make them sound like whines (or at least like warnings), and another discussed the specific use of the phrase “la jura,” a warning used only when the cops are closing in.

Small can be a good topic. However, functions of aging require me to express a lament over an extremely small symbol, the “@,” which is a funny little “a” with a tail circling it.

Let me explain: Continue reading →

 

 “Hey, hey, anybody listening? Hey, hey, anybody there? Hey, hey, anybody listening? Anybody care?”

That song, which we often sing in Sunday school, means more to me in light of recollections of my acquisition of the English language, when I was a child.

One of the most stifling memories I have about childhood — wrought largely by the influence of siblings and schoolmates — deals with the pronouncement, “Don’t get excited.”

Some admonished me not to “go ape,” and others even added another word to enhance the ape-ness motif.

Thinking about how people express themselves in speech and writing, I wondered about the multitudes who simply ask, “What’s the big deal?” or “So it’s mispelled, but you can still read it, can’t you?” Continue reading →

Back in my bachelor days, way before the Internet was even conceived of and in an era when people actually wrote real honest-to-gosh letters that they mailed with real stamps, I came across an interesting habit among some correspondents.

Let me explain:

I’d been late in replying to one pen pal and got a letter whose writer seemed irate and who wrote something like, “And if I don’t receive a letter from you by this afternoon, I’ll never write to you again.” Then she added (in parentheses) “joke!”

Well, that did it. She chided me for not writing as quickly as I might but needed to assure me that she didn’t really mean it when she threatened the boycott. Here’s what she might have been thinking as she wrote the letter: If I don’t include “joke!” Art will think I’m serious about the threat. Continue reading →

The Grammar and Spelling Police are on duty again this week. That oft-mentioned electronic message board on Mills keeps committing errors. Here’s how:

An Albuquerque TV station, reporting on the much-understated “hazing” incident involving members of the Robertson High School football team, showed in the background the animated sign which carried the message, among other things, “The drama is begining.”

It’s not the drama that’s beginning (note the three n’s), it’s the typos. Remember, some of these repeated messages remain for days. Continue reading →

For years I’ve looked for ways of saving time. And paper, and even effort.

Reluctantly entering the computer-acquisition crowd, I got my first computer — not for me personally but for the office where I worked — on the advice of a Highlands colleague, Ron Maestas.

Maestas was light years ahead of me, his having delved into the then-new invention when the first models arrived. Some were Radio Shack TRS-80 models, lacking a hard drive and surrendering all the data once the machine was unplugged. Continue reading →

In Sunday School back in the Dark Ages, my co-teacher and I asked our students what turns them on. “What do you really like to do?” we asked each one.

The responses ranged from celebrating a birthday to winning a football game to kicking around with friends to being with family. Then my colleague turned the camera on me: And what do you like to do, Art?

I fidgeted, stumbled and stammered, not having expected the question. Well, aside from being with people, especially family and friends, I mentioned that I enjoyed long walks with my whippets, Moosa and Watsita, which coincidentally had been given me by my co-teacher’s daughter that year.

I admit it. I love most dogs. I loved throwing a ball as far as I could in order for Moosa to retrieve it and “hand” it back, somewhat gooey. Or riding my bike as fast as I could and watching the dogs overtake me, even though my speedometer showed 35 mph, which equals 245 mph in dog miles. I loved those animals, both now dead. Watsita died of a bronchial infection; Moosa died shortly after being mauled by a neighbor’s dog that slipped out of his chain and collar. Continue reading →

A high school play, “The Perfect Idiot,” deals with an extremely bright senior who misses all 100 items on a true-false test.

How’d he manage that? Statistical probability dictates that anyone who simply checks off every answer as “true” or every one as “false” is bound to score around 50 percent. In order to earn a perfect zero (or perfect hundred), the student obviously needed to know all the answers.

But does anybody have all the answers? Or, perhaps more appropriately, “Does anyone even know the questions?”

I refer to the just-released results that show which area schools achieved “Adequate Yearly Progress,” or AYP, as part of the No Child Left Behind act, also known as NCLB, and sometimes called “Nickelbee.”

The results show that of West Las Vegas’s nine schools, four of them, Don Cecilio Elementary, Rio Gallinas charter school, Union Elementary and Valley Elementary met the AYP standard. Continue reading →

It seemed a bit ironic as I contemplated the existence of the content and the medium as I carried on an e-mail conversation with Martin Salazar, the former Optic reporter, now the education writer with the Albuquerque Journal.

People have been e-mailing one another for years, so that fact in itself isn’t unusual. The irony was that I was asking Salazar his opinion on an article he’d written this week on a topic I have trouble accepting: online college degrees.

Salazar’s front-page article is about two Albuquerque residents, Jenna Harper and Yvette Sanchez, who recently earned online bachelor’s degrees from Western New Mexico University without ever setting foot on the Silver City campus.

The irony is that I don’t fully accept the notion that degrees should be awarded that way, but as I was quizzing Salazar, he pointed out that at that moment, he was in a hospital waiting room in Albuquerque waiting for his father to be seen by a doctor. Continue reading →

One of the justifications for terse writing is the supposed cost of space. An inch of space in the New York Times, for example, would cost a fortune.

So if the publishers of Gotham City’s leading newspaper can, they’ll sell the space for a premium price and try not to give too much of it away.

The notion of tight newspaper space came clear to me this week as I watched David Giuliani, the Optic’s managing editor, going through old files for his Back in Time feature that appears on Page 1 every day.

This month, Giuliani picked files from July 1942, about many people who have since passed on. Someone born in 1942 would be in the mid-60s. But more impressive are the appearance and the content of those old files.

The Optic looked like many other newspapers of that era, with screaming all-caps headlines in 2-inch type. A banner headline that read “FIVE SLAIN IN DRUNKEN BRAWL” invariably would carry a distant or even foreign dateline. Continue reading →

The second-silliest traffic arrangement in the Meadow City — second only to the welcome-but-stay-off-this-street messages on Seventh Street — is around the Old Town Plaza.

Let me explain:

There are five ways to enter the Plaza: from Bridge Street, North Gonzales, Hot Springs, West National and South Pacific. But in some cases, once you’re in that magic circle, you still need to yield to traffic coming from Hot Springs and from South Pacific.

The configuration — called a “circus” in other countries — is bad for traffic rounding the park and heading east, toward Bridge Street, or back around the park.

Most cumbersome is having to yield to traffic coming from South Pacific, in the area of Art and Stones. Why? Because the stretch is w-a-y too long, and by the time motorists yield for one car, there are more coming down the pike. Continue reading →