How often do people use tired expressions about which they have little or no understanding? They seem like the appropriate thing at the time, but on numerous occasions we don’t put much thought into them.

I was almost a senior citizen before I grasped the meaning of “You can’t have your cake and eat it too.” Well why not? Though cake is the last thing I’d order at a restaurant (unless they’re out of pie), I understood the expression to mean you can’t have it and therefore can’t eat it. Why not? Too many calories? Too expensive? One ought to be able to have (own) the cake and then eat it.

Someone finally explained that it means you can own a beautifully decorated cake and admire it, show it off, bronze it, photograph it, but if you eat it, you can’t have it (any more).

Continue reading →

A recent front-page story about a resident with a hoarding disorder made its way to our Journalism Practices classroom at Highlands.

The discussion concerned a woman who collects stuff — so much stuff that the city went after her. The more salient issue was not the article itself but the term “hoarding disorder,” which few of us had heard of. Does any psychological association recognize it?

I came home that evening and asked my wife, “What to you is a hoarding disorder?”

“It’s what you’ve got,” she said.

“Please explain what you mean, My Delight.”

Continue reading →

Evidence of a huge movement to communicate shows up at every big box. Just walk down the aisles at Wal-Mart and you’ll find dozens of shingles advertising coffee, for example, and below it will be the word in Spanish, “cafe.”

Clearly, the translation is done to accommodate our Spanish-speaking newcomers, not so much to teach us that bread is “pan.” Well, we knew that already. Yet, it’s helpful if there’s residual acquisition of one language or the other as we browse the aisles.

It’s great to know that a paloma is a dove, but the diminutive form, palomita, is popcorn, according to the store markers. And syrup isn’t miel, as I used to believe, but jarabe, which sounds more like a dance than a topping for pancakes.

I suspect much of four-decades-ago northern New Mexico was more bilingual than now. One hardly hears Spanish on the playgrounds, and even at public meetings where the topic is bilingual education, it’s in English.

Continue reading →

It took three traffic light changes to get through a short distance from Daylight Donuts to Mills Avenue Tuesday.

Granted, it was close to 3 p.m., in time for a shift change at the hospital and the dismissal of school.

My delay was compounded by a good Samaritan just in front of me who gave two buses permission to cut ahead in line, and then scanned the territory for others who might want to do the same.

That act of charity is fine, unless you’re at the end of the line.

Continue reading →

“I better not catch him looking at my girl.” Well, aside from the fact that “I” should really be “I’d,” or “I had,” the sentence does pose a threat, the kind kids make on playgrounds, usually under the guise of wanting to protect his girl, his property, as if anyone in the school were the possession of someone else.

But let’s put this into context. The implied “better not” message apparently is that the other fellow who looks at the girl is owed a beating. But the threat doesn’t say that at all. It simply implies it would be best if the “owner” doesn’t find out about the gawking.

Simple? One of these “better not” threats came at the end of a forever-forwarded e-mail message. Titled “Strange Coincidences,” it exhorted the thousands of recipients to pass it on, chain-letter style. The e-mail provided some interesting information of the multiple Biblical references to Iraq. One of them places the Garden of Eden in Iraq, and another says, “Mesopotamia, which is now Iraq, was the cradle of civilization.” The e-mail also locates Noah’s Ark and the Tower of Babel in Iraq.

Continue reading →

What kind of cream puffs are we raising? Does handling the controls of a Wii constitute the sum total of kids’ activity?My grandson and namesake received a Wii for his birthday, a joint gift to be shared with his brother, whose birthday is a few days later in the year.

Continue reading →

School has started, and it looks as if my co-teacher Tom McDonald and I have been blessed with an eager, albeit small, group of students interested in the journalism course we’re offering at Highlands.

Strange, but the eight years since I retired have at once given me confidence and made me more meticulous about planning lessons. Mainly, I find it necessary to move into the 21st century and put aside some of the bromides I used before.

The language of journalism, mainly what we call Associated Press Style, hasn’t changed a great deal since 1999, when I taught my last journalism class. Yet, regarding the use of technology, I’m feeling like the student, not the prof.

It would be easy to fall back into delivering lecture 107, a practice I swore I’d never cultivate.

Let me explain:

Continue reading →

Remember the times when one needed a tool to open a can or bottle?

That was in the days before dozens of techniques were developed to ease access to stuff. A husband once came home to his wife’s announcement that the electricity had gone off and therefore, no supper.

“But we cook with gas,” he said. She answered, “But the can opener’s electric.”

When I was a child, opening a can of cat food required the use of an 80-pound opener which, if you dropped it, would open your foot instead. Today, my wife showed up with an eight-pack of cat food that comes in plastic cups with an easy-open foil on top. Times have changed.

Continue reading →

It’s amazing how things can (almost) change in an instant. Everybody dreads that unwelcome phone call telling of an accident or other tragedy and wishes it away.

The parentheses-enclosed “almost” indicates there was no tragedy, but it was the next – nearest thing.

But first, some background:

At first I really resented the presidential fiat that nobody travel more than 55 mph. That was in the ‘70s and part of the ‘80s, when a presumed gas shortage was supposed to be alleviated if everybody slowed down, even on toll roads, engineered to accommodate huge volumes of traffic at high speeds.

That was then. I grew to enjoy it and even today keep a bit under the limit. The lower speed limit gave us time to enjoy the scenery; it decreased everyone’s likelihood of being killed. Yet, there were those who fought it. They reasoned that a 55-mile trip now would take a full hour, whereas before the speed limit, the same distance would take about 45 minutes.

Continue reading →

We used to have names for people in our youth who made a bad impression. Any girl, doomed to never having a second date, who 1) dipped her straw into the guy’s malt or tied a knot in his straw, 2) expected the guy to pay for her meal, or 3) (in later, more affluent times) ordered the most expensive item on the menu, got relegated to the lowest rung of huwomanity. She became a “mensa.”

We’d dismiss these junior high and high school schoolmates with much derision, even though those about whom we’d say, “Es una mensa” more likely wouldn’t have dreamed of a second date with us anyway.

My English/Spanish dictionary defines mensa or menso as someone who’s dull and witless. It’s a coincidence, then, that Mensa (with a capital “M”) is also Latin for “table” and is the name of a prestigious organization of bright people, those whose intelligence is verified through a tough series of tests.

Continue reading →