One of the burdens of public school teaching is dreaded duty. There’s cafeteria, playground, restroom, hall, bus duty and probably a host of other punishments teachers get subjected to when they first sign on to “earn the big bucks and get three months’ vacation every year.”

Now, my English teacher would question the use of quotation marks above, so I need to stress they’re deliberate. By using the unattributed quote marks, I’m being ironic and saying teachers don’t earn much and seldom get vacations, as they’re too busy going to summer school to keep up their credentials.

Years back, I was sharing playground duty in a high school when I saw my co-teacher approach a group of freshmen with, “Don’t you see I’m in the area? I can hear the bad words. Don’t use them in front of me.” Continue reading →

What’s happened during my dotage to dash almost all interest in how things operate? Why’s it always easier, as I push 70, to push mechanical matters to a son or grandson? Let me explain:

Much more affluent than in earlier years, I’ve acquired much “stuff.” No home is without a computer, and I notice as I struggle on the treadmill at the City Recreation Center, that a number of people my age are wired, in the sense that they have music being piped in from a device the size of a quarter.

Twenty years ago, these same fitness buffs and I would have had a 60-pound Victrola record player strapped to our backs as we sweated to the oldies on a steam-powered treadmill.

But back to “stuff”: Either through the simple act of outgrowing it or my inability to keep up with the technology, I buy but don’t fiddle much with gadgets anymore. Of course, I will use my laptop computer until I expire, but will probably never cultivate a taste or tolerance for electronic gadgets found in Better Image catalogs. Continue reading →

Although most aspects to our recent trip to five European countries remain the highlight of all our travels, it’s good to be back. International travel can be stressful. I write this as a legitimate concern, not as one wishing to brag about all the places we’ve been. Only since retirement (mine) have we taken long trips, and unlike many others around us, we spend our money on trips, not fancy cars or houses.

That said, let me mention that the Trujillo-as-Terrorist factor this time was diminished. In 2003, I wrote a column titled “Do I look like a terrorist?” an honest question wrought by the constant delaying, prodding, poking, pummeling, patting, probing and pinching by airport personnel. Continue reading →

One of the things that make a reporter’s job difficult is the ever-popular “no comment,” uttered by politicians to reporters who make them squirm.

Even back in the ’50s, the TV producers of the popular sit-com “Dobie Gillis” were aware of the face-saving remark and had Maynard G. Krebs tutoring Gillis, played by Dwayne Hickman, in saying “no comment” before running for high school student council.

A recent issue of the Journal North showed three unrelated, side-by-side articles, each with the tell-tale no-comment. Generally, when reporters fail to get a response from the source, they write that the person “declined to comment.”

But lately, perhaps in their zeal to economize on words, writers have simply written “declined comment.” Curious about whether it’s common practice or a mere aberration, I Googled “declined comment” and unearthed far too many instances to present here. Continue reading →

COPENHAGEN, Denmark – Much communication – or lack of it — comes in the form of merely believing we know what another has transmitted.

I was leafing through the Laugh-Lines section of a church publication and was struck by the fact that all eight jokes dealt with kids’ misunderstanding of certain words.

For example, a kid in church tells his parents he knows God’s first name. How come? “Well simple, Dad. In the Lord’s Prayer it says, ‘Our father, who art in Heaven, Harold be thy name.'”

Or the kid who asks about the fate of the flea when hearing about Joseph’s instructions to take his wife and child and flee to Egypt. Continue reading →

AMSTERDAM, The Netherlands – Anyone dissatisfied with almost-$4 gasoline prices can’t expect corresponding savings by flying. Our recent international flight cost my family . . . well, you don’t really want to know. Nor do we. Only our credit-card issuer has any interest.

To make the trip across the Atlantic, aircraft need to be big, bulky and commodious. The usual seating arrangement is two aisles, with two seats on the left, two on the right and three or four in the middle.

We tried to sleep upright, being crowded by our seatmate. The worst seat on a long flight is next to the window. Sure, it’s fun to watch the takeoff and landing, but the rest of the time, all we see are clouds. Continue reading →

A few years back, I got quite a bit of feedback on a column I wrote titled “La jura got there at the right time.” Some readers said they were well able to identify with some of the accounts of an aborted melee.

It dealt with an ambush of a few friends and me as we walked, minding our own business, on North Grand one evening.

We were on the lower side of our mid-teens at the time, and the two Freds, Leroy and I – clad in Levis turned up once at the cuff and a white T-shirt with a pocket – were made to jump even further onto the sidewalk as a passing car deliberately swerved our way.

We thought it was a trick being played by someone we knew, but we soon discovered they were serious. They armed themselves with sticks, bicycle chains and even a radio aerial, as they came toward us. Continue reading →

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 →