One gets cabin fever. It was easy to be stricken by that affliction during last week’s frigid days of winter.

Outside of the Optic, stalactites and stalagmites grew to about 12 feet. I craved air and sunshine, which I received with a quick walk around nearby Lincoln Park.

I had just started my brisk walk when a touch-football game broke out. I saw a group of four — three men and a woman — playing as if they meant it. I needed to take in all that action. The group, probably in their 30s, were using a softball instead of a football, but from what I could determine, they were following football rules, Vegas style.

The group’s sloshing around brought me back to my youth, when going beyond touch football and having kids knock one another down was the rule, not the exception. I wondered whether this two-on-two game was inspired by some very recent Facebook clips showing the mayor of a big city urging people not to be foolish. The clip showed young men leaping out of their balconies, flipping and landing head-first into deep snow that fell in places like Boston. Continue reading →

Why must people look a gift horse in the mouth? I used to struggle with that expression — until someone wiser explained.

I surmise the expression refers to those who question the quality of something given to them. Accordingly, if you receive a horse with no reins attached, you should be grateful and not check under the hood to determine the age, health, strength or orneriness of the beast.

As a teacher, I struggled with the notion of penalizing students for slips and falls way early in the course. Essentially — like many of my colleagues — I threw out the lowest grade students had received that term, on the assumption that every student is entitled to one poorformance. Then one kid asked, “What you doing that for?” My response, “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

Remember, a foolproof way of determining a horse’s age is by counting the teeth.

We’re getting a version of that on Facebook, the online chat room that lets users spill out whatever they want. Some turn it into a religious pilgrimage, guaranteeing that if you write “amen” to a posting, untold riches will be yours in 15 minutes. Others simply like to chat or play games. Some post family photos. But too many people “doth protest too much” in the sense of using Facebook for bragging on themselves. Continue reading →

It might have been around the time of my first prom date — that would have been in the mid-’50s — when we’d been studying early man: Piltdown, Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon. We students at Immaculate Conception School became fascinated by the terms, presented with drawings of what our ancestors might have looked like.

Accordingly, anyone who failed to render a quick and correct answer when called on by Sister Mucha Misa was labelled a Neanderthal, the same way we’d brand our classmates as creeps or nerds, or even Communists.

It was then that for no reason I could discern, my prom date called me a Neanderthal. I still wonder whether that appellation came because I was aggressive as I dropped her off on her front porch — or not aggressive enough.

Remember, in the innocent ‘50s, there wasn’t much to do in Las Vegas but go to one of three movie theaters, four if you count the drive-in. Or we could swallow a late-night burger and fries at the Home Cafe or the Silver Spur, the only 24-hour restaurants in town.

As I was leaving my date’s front porch, I recalled the Neanderthal christening and said, “You’re wrrronng. I just got a promotion — to Cro-Magnon.” Continue reading →

Let’s say you have a load of wheat that weighs 3,942 pounds. What is it worth at 50 cents per bushel, deducting 1,050 pounds for tare?

Well, before attempting an answer we need to know what a tare is or where on the planet one can score on wheat that goes for two bushels for a buck.

And here’s another question that’s a bit more challenging: What is meant by the following: alphabet, phonetic, orthography, etymology and syllabication?

What I have in front of me is portions of an eighth grade end-of-term examination administered to students in Salina, Kans., and elsewhere. The year was 1895, and we assume students who prepared for the exam had neither the Internet with which to Google the answers, nor had they been distracted by incessant text messaging. They didn’t even have hand-held calculators. More likely each student needed to check out an abacus. Continue reading →

Some expressions simply rankle. But even so, their overuse leads them to become part of the lexicon, which in turn works toward acceptance.

Let me explain:

This week, the GOP-controlled New Mexico House is tackling what is called “social promotion,” which has led to passionate debates on whether to retain third-grade school kids if they haven’t acquired the tools to read at grade level. I’ve already written considerably on this topic — you can probably infer that I’m opposed to giving kids a second helping of third grade — and my aim is to write mainly about the semantics of “social promotion.”

Having taught at least one year at every level, from first grade through graduate school, I wince at hearing the term “social promotion.” To me it smacks of some kind of favoritism. It’s almost as if a pair of powerful parents have been politicking principals with the insistence that their child mustn’t be made to repeat third grade. Continue reading →

There’s a certain satisfaction one derives by doing a good deed. And the good feeling is enhanced when others notice it.

So it was as I lay on a padded table at the United Blood Services lab in Santa Fe last week, donating blood as part of my three-times-a-year regimen. Of course, Las Vegas has its own blood drives — one very successful drive for the motorcycle rally in the summer.

I don’t know why I’ve chosen Santa Fe as the place to make deposits; it might well be that I’m on a first-name basis with two of the phlebotomists who draw my blood. They’re Connie and Jerry, each with more than 20 years’ experience.

Most of the time they’ve been successful in locating the proper vein in my arm, but on at least one occasion, when they looked for blood, they searched in vein. I read somewhere that giving blood is healthful on at least three scores: It earns me another t-shirt, with “Hero” in bold red letters across the front; it sets a good example in an act that just might help another; and finally, I recall, for men it prevents excessive buildup of iron in our system. Continue reading →

Perception. What did we see? What did we really see? And what did we want to see?

A number of columns ago, I wrote about a particularly bloody college football game between two Big 10 teams, a fierce, decades-long rivalry.

The winning team lost two quarterbacks to injuries; the losing team lost with its second-string signal-caller at the controls.

Well, this was in the time when TV was in its infancy. If “instant replay,” to which we football fans are now quite accustomed and addicted, existed in those days, it was nascent. There was, for example, a play in Sunday’s Super Bowl in which the Seattle receiver needed to do some loop-de-loops to register a catch, finally managing to snare the ball before it hit the ground. That gave Seahawks fans some hope. Continue reading →

interested in fitness and athletics provided their picks for Sunday’s Super Bowl. The participants came up with an almost even split. And most predict a close game. Here are their opinions:

Albert Gonzales, a retired state government employee, is a Bronco fan who picks the Patriots because they have “power and all-around defense. It’ll be a close game.”

Jason Green, a fitness tech, is a senior majoring in forestry at Highlands. Like many others, he roots for the Broncos, but since his team isn’t in the big game, he picks the Patriots by 12 points. Why: “They’re better prepared … they want it more.”

Juan Jauregui, another forestry major at Highlands and a senior from Sapello, doesn’t have a favorite team; he expects the Seahawks to win. “From what I’ve seen, watching how they want to win, I pick Seattle in a close game.” Continue reading →

An inveterate verbophile, I’ve always been interested in words, what they mean, why they mean, why they can hurt and heal. Remember that bit of doggerel about “sticks and stones” that may “break my bones”?

I like to think my vocabulary is on par with the next person’s, but even after seven decades of pondering, deciphering, memorizing and manipulating words, I often come across new ones. A friend and frequent contributor to this column, Bruce Wertz, hit his Facebook friends with a word that is new to many: “hyperpolysyllabicomania.” Thanks to some fairly predictable Greek and Latin roots, we can figure out that Bruce’s new entry has to do with “ultra,” ”many,” “syllables” and a passion, as in the ending, “mania.” So without even looking up the definition, we safely come up with Bruce’s passion for long words.

But beyond long words, what about those with prefixes that connote similar things? For example, think of the myriad words beginning with “sp” that suggest water: spill, spurt, splash, sputter. How many more can you add to the list without consulting a dictionary?

And just recently (“recently” for a person my age could span decades, eons), I became familiar with the “fl” prefix which suggests rapid movement. Try it: fling, flick, flay, flip. Now, provide some of your own. Continue reading →

As I look back, almost exactly 50 years, to the time when all Highlands students who hoped to graduate needed to pass the university-devised English Usage Exam, I realize it wasn’t so hard after all.

The anticipation of hurdles, in my experience, is far worse than the reality. “What if I don’t pass the exam? Will that mean I can’t graduate?” we’d ask ourselves. Indeed, failure to pass it meant taking it again until we passed, but I forget the requisite waiting period before re-taking. At the time, Highlands was under the quarter system, with each term lasting about 10 weeks. I suspect those who failed the exam needed to wait until the following quarter.

The word “English” in the title of the since-discontinued exam was a misnomer. That implied it was a specialized test for English majors that required learning and retaining hosts of terms like passive voice, run-on sentences, gerunds and fragments.

Not so. It was simply an examination that required clear, concise English. But unfortunately, in my years of teaching at Highlands, I became accustomed to hearing students posit that the test was something designed exclusively for English majors. Continue reading →