Catch me if you can

Over at Slate, Ron Rosenbaum’s piece “Notes on Catch” attempts to capture “the way our language has become increasingly dominated by rapidly cycling catchphrases”:

Rapidly cycling because in blogospheric time, they speed from clever witticism to tired cliché in the virtual blink of an eye.

Look how long it took “jump the shark” to jump the shark. But “under the bus”—as in, “throwing someone under the bus”—got old from overuse in a matter of weeks.

It’s a fun piece to read, as it offers the opportunity to measure your own perceptions of the catchphrases he picks on (“Party on,” “My bad,” “Not so much”) against his estimations of where they are in the cycle of just-baked freshness–>currency–>gentle mockery–>over it all.  For example, he picks on “at the end of the day” as a catchphrase so stale he can’t believe anyone uses it anymore.  I’m not sure anyone uses it as a catchphrase anymore–it’s one of those dead metaphors that has turned into a cliché.  Actually, it’s so dead it’s practically an adverb. 

And “throwing someone under the bus”?  My sister has been using this to describe machinations at her workplace since at least 2003, and the first time I heard it, I laughed out loud and vowed to add it to my own personal lexicon.  The first Urban Dictionary listing for it is dated 2004.  And via this post comes a Newsweek article in which William Safire cites Cyndi Lauper using it in 1983.  I guess Ron Rosenbaum–and Tony Dokoupil, author of the Newsweek piece–think the phrase is now dead from overuse, but I object to Rosenbaum’s implication that it was practically just invented last week.

And as long as I’m taking issue, let’s think about “jump the shark.”  It’s arguably a more resilient phrase because we didn’t have a phrase for this concept before “jump the shark” was invented.  The phrase, in fact, created the category of things (initially, TV shows, but now pretty much any creative/cultural/public endeavor) that have reached the peak of their excellence and begun to deteriorate, particularly by losing track of what made them unique and resorting to ridiculous extremes to keep our attention (as in the phrase’s origin myth, Fonzie’s motorcycle jump over a shark tank in the fourth season of Happy Days).   “Throwing someone under the bus,” on the other hand, while evocative and satisfyingly grandiose, isn’t qualitatively that much different from “throwing someone to the sharks,” “scapegoating” someone, or making someone “take the fall.”  I would miss it if it were gone, but I’d have plenty of metaphors to choose from.

I’m not sure I buy Rosenbaum’s contention that language just moves so much faster these days because of all the blogging and information overload and stuff.  I particularly object to his implication that these delightful phrases are all rapidly approaching, if not actually past, some mythical sell-by date after which–what?  No one who wants to be taken seriously will use them anymore? 

In my linguistic life (as in my material life, unfortunately) I rarely throw anything out.  Nifty, hooey, and malarkey are all part of my working vocabulary, although I am aware that these are all words that sounded cutting-edge right around the time my grandpa started wearing long pants.  However, if you plug each of them into Google News, you’ll find that they are all still in current journalistic use as well. 

And by the way, I applaud What Now?’s resolution to use the phrase “swotting up” as a linguistic treat for herself while she swots up on various books for next year’s teaching.  I’d much rather swot up than throw someone under the bus, anyway, or get thrown under myself.

The days are just packed

It took about ten days to begin to get the hang of summer.  My summer chart is showing me that work is getting done, tasks are being accomplished, and fun is being had.  But I no longer feel like a pot about to boil.  Or a crab about to be boiled alive by the rising temperature of the pot.

On Tuesday, Stubb had the afternoon off and the three of us drove to a national park for a spot of mild hiking and absorption of cubic acres of natural beauty.  Afterwards, we had a very nice dinner at an ambitious restaurant, which we decided was in belated celebration of our anniversary.  I couldn’t quite separate my enjoyment of these specific things (astonishing rocks, late-afternoon sunlight, a wisp of a waterfall, silly jokes, roasted-garlic hummus, coconut cheesecake) from my enjoyment of the fact that we were doing something so…perfectly unnecessary. 

And heading homeward yesterday, the Snork Maiden and I had six hours to dawdle in an airport.  I’d have thought this would have been painful, but it really wasn’t.  We wandered around, checked out the kids’ play area (which would have been okay if there were any kids in it), read, updated our summer travel journal, and generally entertained ourselves.  While waiting until it was late enough to check our bag, we talked with a Spanish woman, traveling on business, who had missed her flight and was planning to wait in the airport until the next one, 24 hours later.  She showed us her travel photos on her digital camera, and pictures of her 17-month-old son.  We showed her our summer journal (which we actually started in May on our first trip to see Stubb) and she wrote a message in it.  We wrote her a note on a postcard for a souvenir, and I gave her my copy of Brick Lane.

It was easy, in those six hours, to be relaxed and just Be Here Now (a phrase that always makes me think of Spalding Gray, who tried so hard to be).  Thank you, Snork Maiden.  Thank you, summer.  Thank you, vacation.  Thank you, new job that comes with summer vacation.  And thank you, Stubb, for going to work in a beautiful place where I don’t work.  That, I think, was key. 

Read this! Now!

Alison Bechdel posted on her blog this four-page comic she did for Entertainment Weekly‘s 1000th issue.  It’s called “Compulsory Reading” and it’s about the books she never gets to because of her aversion to being told what to read.  If you know her work, you will be as overjoyed as I was to find it; if you haven’t read Fun Home or followed Dykes to Watch Out For (Yes!  There’s going to be an omnibus collection of all the Dykes books!) for the last twenty years, it will be an introduction.  Go on!  What are you waiting for?  Er, not that it’s compulsory or anything.  In fact, just forget I mentioned it, and pretend you discovered it yourself.

A life of pluses and minuses

It’s only six months since I stopped teaching at the two-year proprietary college formerly known in this blog as 2YC, but it seems longer—probably because so much has changed in my working life since then.  I’d already been hired to teach the one course at New RU, but it didn’t begin until January, and my employment at Starfleet Academy was nothing but an extremely vague idea. 

I remember a lot of things about 2YC, of course, but many details are starting to fade.  One of the things I enjoyed there was getting to know faculty in fields besides my own—this was certainly facilitated by the fact that we didn’t have offices, but shared a couple of lounge/workroom spaces.  (A recurrent lesson at 2YC was that there were often unexpected benefits to the working conditions we grumbled about.  Offices would have been nice, though.)

Twice a year, the entire faculty came together for (paid) training sessions—usually a formal presentation by some outside expert in something, followed by breakout sessions in mixed groups from different disciplines.  At an early one of these on the subject of grading, I remember a particular faculty member from the visual arts lamenting that the 100-point grading scale “only gives us a few points to recognize excellence!”  Six months later, I heard her repeat the same complaint—and six months after that.  But it must be said that she had a point: all the grades that we and our students recognize as “very good” and above are bunched up in one end of the range, and we spend a lot of time making fine distinctions between a high B-plus and a low A-minus, for example.  (At least, I do.)  Going lower down, there’s a lot less fine distinction, at least in my experience in the humanities: a D paper is a D paper, and an F is certainly an F.  There might—say, in freshman comp, which usually has to be passed with a C or C minus—be another fussy little range of fine distinctions between D-plus and C-minus. 

This is why New Sociology Prof’s frustration with plus and minus grades  (via Inside Higher Ed) surprised me.  Yes, in one way plain old A-B-C grades are easier for faculty because they recognize just a few categories of performance: A is excellent, B is proficient, C is adequate, D is inadequate.  Or something like that.  Of course, with grade inflation, it’s more like A is excellent, B is a sign that something’s lacking, C is a disaster, and D means you kept showing up stoned.  There might be less inflationary “creep,” though, with plain old letter grades, because while it’s easy for a softie like me to bump up a B-plus to an A-minus, pushing a B up to an A requires much more conviction, and it’s much clearer whether the numbers support it.

The problem with plain old letter grades is that many students who make significant progress during the term will not see that progress reflected in the final grade.  As a supervising prof of mine used to say, there are a thousand ways to earn a B, so two B-range papers may look quite different, but any way you slice it, there is a qualitative difference between a B-minus paper and a B-plus paper.  And in ten or fourteen or sixteen weeks, a lot of students will make the trek from B-minus to B-plus.  In freshman comp, they may do it by learning to develop a compelling thesis statement and letting it help them achieve a clearer organization.  They may do it by making their evidence more specific or their claims less broad and sweeping.  They may even do a lot of it by learning how to repair comma splices or some other pervasive error.  Whatever way they do it, though, it has to be dampening for them to suspect that their final grade is going to be exactly the same as if they hadn’t put in that effort in the first place.  Why exactly are we giving grades if they don’t help the students track their progress?  (And yes, I know that the students can see that their grades on individual assignments are improving, which may help the most motivated among them, but for the many—most—who mostly just want to get the requirement over with, why not just accept that a sequence of B-minus papers will earn them a comfortable B?)

If I’d stayed at NCC, where there were no plus and minus grades, I suspect I’d have shifted, over time, to giving many more C’s at the start of a semester, so that students would be motivated to reach for the B range.  But I’m not convinced that I would have been happy with that, either.  I like “grading tough” at the beginning—and it’s always easier for me to do it when I know they have time to improve—but I don’t want to distort my standards, which I believe are well within the norms for my discipline.  (And have had this confirmed at norming sessions at multiple institutions.)  As a student, I’d certainly have been annoyed and disoriented if a professor had given a C to a B paper just to try to make me work harder. 

I realize that the system is somewhat crude, and that, as one of NSP’s commenters observed, learning and grading may coexist uncomfortably.  Some of my complaints could, no doubt, be addressed by changing the system—either from the top down or from inside individual courses (and I’ve certainly experimented with different kinds of grading, including narrative evaluation and narrative-based scales of my own invention—about which more another time.  But most of the time, most of us have to work within the traditional scale to which we and our students are accustomed, and I confess I prefer a finer scale to a coarser one.

Fine Lines between covers!

Lizzie Skurnick’s Jezebel feature “Fine Lines”, which I’ve previously lauded here, is soon to be a book.  (Really soon, as in “sometime next summer.”)  Over on Jezebel, there’s a call for “what sort of accompanying online content and reader participation opportunities you’d love to see.”  It couldn’t hurt to send over suggestions for books Lizzie Skurnick hasn’t yet given the “Fine Lines” treatment.  (The most recent feature: Julie of the Wolves.)  Apparently, they’re also seeking a title for the tome.

State of mind

Welcome to EJB, who commented on a couple of recent posts.  I’m glad you made it over here!  Who knew we were both Whangdoodle fans? 

The Snork Maiden and I are in Stubb City, Stubb State, hanging out with–you guessed it–Stubb.  The Snork Maiden is on a cooking kick, which gives us something to do while Stubb is working.  We’re going to make pasta salad this afternoon for a picnic dinner.  First, though, I have about a dozen fussy email tasks to do for the conference; fortunately, I can do them as well from Stubb State as anywhere else. 

Forbidden LEGO

I was going to call this post “I ♥ LEGO,” but first I clicked over to Amazon to see if I could find a title that actually came from a book, and there really is a book called Forbidden LEGO: Build the Models Your Parents Warned You Against!   How could I resist?  Anyway, the reason I heart LEGO is that a 10-year-old, an 8-year-old, and a 6-year-old have been harmoniously playing on my living-room floor for an hour, and I can sit here and mess around on the computer to my heart’s content while listening with half an ear to their schemes for the LEGO universe. 

We have a 14-gallon Rubbermaid container three-quarters full of LEGO pieces, mostly collected by Stubb from garage sales, and there’s no end to what you can find in there–regular bricks out the wazoo, of course, plus dozens and dozens of odd and unusual pieces (“I found a LEGO octopus!” Young’un C. just announced).  I’m sure I rolled my eyes most times Stubb acquired yet another bag of garage-sale LEGO, but honey, I was wrong and you were right. 

I meant to post this a few days ago–it’s one in a series of compositions in bathroom mirror and Expo dry-erase marker.  I call it Lolcat Countdown. 

In the waiting room

From the waiting room at the car repair place today: the March 20, 2006, New Yorker “Shouts and Murmurs” column, “Ideas for Paintings” by Jack Handey:

Stampede of Nudes

The trouble with most paintings of nudes is that there isn’t enough nudity. It’s usually just one woman lying there, and you’re looking around going, “Aren’t there any more nudes?” This idea solves that.

What has frightened these nudes? Is it the lightning in the background? Or did one of the nudes just spook? You don’t know, and this creates tension.

Read the whole article. 

Confidential to Pym Fan: Is a comma required after “2006” above? 

How many ducks in a row?

I updated my sidebar to include images of books I’m currently reading or have just finished.  I’m really enjoying being able to bring home a bagful of library books without guilt.

Because I’m warped this way, I made myself a big summer chart with the following categories: Book, Family, Household, Starfleet Academy/New RU, Writing Life, and Fun.  I put in tasks that I’m planning to do in blue, and things I’ve accomplished in black.  I feel like I really need to be able to see what I want to get done, and also a record of what I have done so far. 

I think my life is about to be changed by What Now?’s post on John Perry’s “Structured Procrastination” concept.  The only problem is that the book has been occupying the top position on the pyramid for a while now, and the book is really what I want to get done (that is, I want to finish the first draft) this summer.  So obviously I have to find something else to sit on top and convince myself that it’s the big project I need to avoid. 

Edited to add: If you like the Perry essay, you might want to take a look at “Procrastination and Perfectionism” as well.

The long tail

Well, I dragged my tail across the finish line, and showed my students their final exams and gave them their final grades.  A gratifying number of them stopped to say that they’d enjoyed having me for English for the last few months, and to thank me.  A couple left notes on my desk, and a few little presents and treats came my way, too–so I now have some thank-you notes to write. 

Those notes are part of the long tail of the school year–the odds and ends that still need doing or have yet to happen, like a couple of meetings and a few items of paperwork and so on.  During the refractory period following exams in which there was no teaching going on, I started reading The Scarlet Letter, one of several books I’ll teach next year but haven’t read before*; I could hypothetically read five or six other books in the same category over the summer, but on the other hand I could also just read them during the school year, since there are other books I want to read this summer, too.  Apparently the book orders come in fits and starts all summer, so I might just see what turns up in my mailbox.  (I think they’ve ordered the Norton critical edition of The Scarlet Letter, but I have the Bedford from a brief period in my life when I got a lot of unsolicited Bedford textbooks, so that’s what I’ve started reading and annotating.) 

I can’t say that I feel suddenly free, since there’s that long tail plus a number of other things going on–stuff happening at New RU, and the administrative work is peaking for the writers’ conference I work on, and goodness knows I’ve neglected the house lately–but a new kind of ease does seem to be creeping over me tonight.  School’s out! 

I didn’t watch that episode last night, by the way.  I graded until 11:30, dropped into bed, and got up at 4:30 to finish.  I might watch it tonight–or I might go to bed.   

*If I were playing Humiliation, admitting to not having read The Scarlet Letter might be my best strategy.  Runner-up among the books I’ll teach next year would be The Grapes of Wrath.  The others are recent American novels and nonfiction.