I don’t think of myself as a prude.   Granted, I do represent a generation in which ballroom dancing, etiquette classes, and other demonstrations of a more “straight-laced” society prevailed.   I still open doors for women, give up my seat when appropriate, and walk on the outside of the sidewalk when my wife is with me.  Those things are ingrained in me … and they seem correct.   I don’t find it necessary to abandon such habits in the name of contemporary social adjustments.

But the issue of crude language is a tough one for me.  Don’t get me wrong.  More than a few four letter words have escaped my lips.  And, yes, I have uttered the “F” word, although I think I could count the number of times over the course of my life.  Even as a college kid it was an uncomfortable thing for me to say.

The recent increase in the use of the “F” word in public is jarring to me.   It’s no longer restricted to crude guy talk over a few beers.  It is common among women, kids, parents, and professionals.   It isn’t whispered any more, and the frequency of use in public presentations on television is shocking to me.  The frequency of its use has brought about familiarity that seems to make it okay, although most television still bleeps it.   Not so in the movies.

I can rationalize its use as a generational thing, but my rationalizations are pretty thin.   It is clearly one of the four letter words that falls into the most sensitive category.   It is hardly the same as the hells, damns, and scatalogical terms that creep into language patterns quite easily.    I pay attention to the use of the “F” word and watch the face of the speaker and those being spoken to.   Most people don’t react at all; it is clearly acceptable.   Some people cringe or drop their heads.   Occasionally someone will express dissatisfaction with the use of the term … but not often.   Clearly, those of us who find it offensive are no longer in the majority.

As a writer (and reader) I find its use to be common and taken for granted.   In fact, I wonder if a modern novel would get any readership if the word wasn’t used early on at last once or twice.  Otherwise, the novel could be characterized as Victorian or archaic.  That’s a real “close the book and choose another” in this day and age.

Stand-up comedians claim ownership of the “F” word. George Carlin, the late dean of stand-up comedy, glorified the use of foul language and became known for its use.  His routine was aimed at giving permission for the use of language that was otherwise unacceptable in public discourse.    He was a very funny man, but I came to a point where I could not tolerate his routine.

The most difficult use of foul language in my realm of encounters is in professional settings where a presenter feels free to unleash strings of loose language.   A presenter or trainer seems to have no problem in using four letter words … even the “F” word … in front of mixed generations, genders, and levels of professional acclaim.  It seems unnecessary and distracting to me (and others with whom I speak) and interferes with my ascribing respect to the presenter.   Sorry about that; it’s true.   Swearing, especially at the extreme level, seems juvenile and anti-intellectual to me in that setting.  It is disrespectful of those in the audience who might be offended by its use, and I think professional presenters should pay attention to that issue.

I’m in an advanced writing class right now, and the “F” word is common.   Somehow, I’ve come to the understanding that it’s part of the writing profession, and my reaction to it may be inappropriate.   I can grant that rationalization, but I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t jarred by it.  I have experimented with using the word in writing small exercises, but it is artificial and uncomfortable for me.  I suspect this is one area where I won’t work hard at becoming current.

There are a number of euphemisms which have crept into contemporary American English, such as friggin’, “F-in”, and freakin’.   I guess that are all designed to give permission for the concept of the use of the F word in a more acceptable form.   Even my use of  “the F word” in this blog posting is the same thing.   You all know what the other three letters are in the unspoken word.  I’m not fooling anyone.  Even a child would understand that at this point in history.

Exactly why the F word fits into the meaning of the sentence escapes me.  It is clearly intended to be a shock word, because its basic meaning is miles away from the intention of the sentence.  I think there is a literary laziness in its use.

But, then again, I’m not 25 years old and a product of a more relaxed generation.   I understand that.  Just don’t expect me not to react when you use the word in conversation with me.  In spite of everything I’ve said, it’s still offensive.

Illustration Credit: Baker

My first “real job” was with Nabisco as a salesperson.   I was a disaster.  Instead of “selling” a store owner on purchased vast amounts of product, I would agree with them that business was slow and they probably didn’t need more boxes of cookies and crackers.  The company sent a man to “mentor” me on my route.  He was a wonderful man who was very patient and instructive with me.  I became very fond of him as a friend, not only as a mentor.

He used the word copasetic at least ten or fifteen times a day.  It is pronounced [koh-pah-set-ick] and it means that everything is just fine, just as it’s supposed to be.  I thought it was from a foreign language, but it turns out that it is a slang word with Canadian origins, although it has been attributed to Italian, Creole French and Hebrew.  The truth is that no one is clear about its etymology.   Bryan Garner says that its true spelling is copaecetic, and that it is also spelled copesetic and copesettic.  The most common spelling is that which I have chosen.

He says of it:

“...(T)his tongue-in-cheek term (means) ‘first-rate, quite satisfactory’….  The word is slangy and jocular.”

I like his use of the words “tongue-in-cheek, slangy and jocular”   It gives copasetic a light-hearted meaning and allows its use in pieces or conversations that aren’t heavy and ponderous.  Every time I use the term I think of my friend from Nabisco.  I may be mistaken, but I think he may have been the only person other than myself I have ever known to have used it around me.

Language selection helps to establish tone.   If the words chosen are morose and heavy, the tone will reflect that.   But if, on the other hand, the tone is jocular and slangy, there is a lightness to the piece.  One is not better than the other.  But it seems to be easier for writers to employ more serious tones unless intentionally writing comedy.   My writing professor at Brown says that writing comedy is difficult.

Obviously, I can’t drop copasetic into every piece I write that I want to be lighthearted, but you can be guaranteed that it will appear in some of them.

Photo Credit: Rivkah

A person can be obtuse. So can a topic, a program, a comment, even a movie.   It all depends upon how engaging they are.  And some people are just plain obtuse … boring … dull.

It doesn’t take a lot to dis-engage someone.  A discussion may start out in a very interesting way, but soon deteriorates.  Overly-abundant repetition, poor choice of words, monotone voice, lack of affect … it can be any number of things that lead to a label of obtuse.  One that really gets to people is when a person is asked a question and they take several minutes of rambling comment before they get around (maybe) to answering the question.  Over-use of technical information can do the same thing.

And it doesn’t take long for a person to develop a reputation as being obtuse. When experience after experience is boring and dull, people soon begin to get the picture.

Being obtuse is not a sign of lack of intelligence.  To the contrary, an obtuse person may be brilliant.  It is their communication skills that get in the way.  It’s awkward when the person is an expert in a specific field and must be included in the data-gathering around a specific task.  You just have to buck up and endure it in order to get the material needed.

I’ve watched some people I would consider to be obtuse and it occurs to me that what they are doing is running their interior computer to get to the answer.   The material flashes by, getting closer and closer to the answer, but the speaker needs to relate all of the lead-up information in order to arrive at the point of definition.  It is as important for the speaker to tell the questioner about the process of arriving at the answer as it is to provide the answer.  Hopefully the questioner is still awake by the time the expert gets to the point of answering.

Moving away from the fields of science, technology and math, there is something to be said about a writer who is obtuse.  At times I think I fit into this category as much as anybody.   My editors tell me that I provide too much background material at the beginning of a piece, delaying the action point.   Some readers, they caution, will have closed the book, having been less than engaged early on.  I was shocked, then pleased, when a recent editor jumped through seven paragraphs before he focused on the sentence where he felt I should start the story!  He was absolutely right.   I found new energy in the story by jumping immediately to the event which caught the attention of the reader … in this case, me.

Last night we went to see J. Edgar, Clint Eastwood’s new movie about J. Edgar Hoover, starring Leonardo DiCaprio.  The shoot-em-up first scene captured me right away, and the rest of the film was, then, anything but obtuse.  It was dark, disturbing, and controversial, but the acting and the writing were so good that it captured me to the very end.

Some would say that an obtuse person is one who is genetically pre-disposed to dullness.  There may be some people for whom that is the case.  But it is clear to me that anyone can act in an obtuse manner, even the most out-going, extrovertive person.  A unique piece of work can be obtuse.  An answer in a debate can be obtuse.  An article can be obtuse.  I hope this posting isn’t obtuse.

Photo Credit: dull

Much of the contemporary literature I’m reading has a variety of plots which are twisting and turning throughout the story.   I find myself scrambling to keep the names and circumstances straight … and frequently wondering just where this story is going.  I found that to be the case in the Steig Larsson series, “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo“, etc.  Larsson showed his writing brilliance in weaving a variety of story lines throughout the text, some of which seemed to have no connection to the others until the moment of denouement, when everything came together, and there was a culmination of the story.  I found myself letting out a long, pent-up breath at that point, thankful that it finally made sense.

It is a sign of a good author that such a dramatic moment comes after a seemingly-convoluted series of plots have occurred.   There has seemed to be no plan, no systemic unfolding of the story … only more and more names, places and details which become harder and harder to remember and calculate.   Then … bang! … it happens.   Something is said, or something happens which ties them all together and the plot proceeds to its intended conclusion … its denouement.

The word denouement, pronounced [dey-noo-mahn] is obviously French, emerging in the 18th century, and meaning “an untying.“  That makes sense.  What a colorful way of describing that moment when the twisted and snarled web is “untied,”  like a fishing line which has become tangled and knotted.

I am remembering a day when I was fishing with my father on a trout stream.  A boy down the stream from us fell and gashed his leg pretty seriously.   My father went to his rescue and was carrying him to our car to transport him to the doctor’s office.  He called for me to gather up the fishing poles … and to hurry.   The boy was losing a lot of blood. 

Paying no attention to proper protocol, I just bundled up the poles, lines, hooks, bait into a big ball and thrust them into the trunk of our car.   Later it took us the better part of the afternoon and into the evening to untangle them.  My father kept insisting that he meant for me to reel the lines in, secure them properly, and place them neatly in the trunk.   That isn’t exactly how I remember the instructions or the tone of voice in which the order had been given, but he was persistent.  So I was wrong.    In any case, it is exactly what it feels like sometimes when reading a complicated novel with various colorful sub-plots winding and weaving throughout the book.*

I suppose the word denouement can have other non-literary meanings and applications.  We might wonder when the moment of denouement will come, for instance,  in the Republican primary race.   The number of sub-plots has been amazing, each of them more colorful than the last.

*(I came to hate fishing, and to this day refuse to engage in such an emotionally-fragile sport!)

Photo Credit: Dunca Daniel

I know, I had the same problem.   I used to think that there was only one meaning for the word prophylactic, and it had something to do with birth control.   As a matter of fact, the device, the condom, came to be known as a prophylactic.  Until fairly recent years I thought that was the only meaning for the word.

When I was in high school I worked in a drug store, mostly as a soda jerk.  (Now there’s a word for us to explore some day.)  But when it was busy I would become a clerk in the pharmacy.  I came to enjoy the discomfort of those men (and boys!) who would slink up to the counter and whisper that they wanted to buy some “rubbers” or some “prophylactics.”  The term varied by age, for the most part.  The problem was that the pharmacy was owned by a pre-Vatican II, conservative Roman Catholic pharmacist who refused to sell birth control devices.   So when I whispered back to the customer that we didn’t sell them it became even more awkward, and he would just slide away and disappear out the front door.  That was in the days before the birth control pill, so it was more of a problem than it might seem.

But, to get to the point, it is only in recent years that I have discovered that the word has a broader meaning.   I think the first time I heard my doctor say that he wanted me to use a prophylactic dosage of a medicine I was shocked.   He must have seen the look on my face, because he then quickly explained that he wanted me to use the medication prior to experiencing the symptoms of the illness.   His hope was to stave off the symptoms before they occurred.

Since then I have experienced the word many times, and … yes … each time I have a little internal smile remembering my days in the pharmacy.

It turns out that pain is one of the most common symptoms of many diseases.   The problem is that when a patient experiences pain a whole range of new symptoms (nausea, vomiting, etc.) come into play and may interfere with the treatment of the root cause.   Therefore, the use of pain medication in advance, preventing the experiencing of the discomfort, allows the attending symptoms to show themselves and be treated.    It makes sense, and I can tell you from first hand experience, that it is effective.

There are other prophylactic methods, as well.   Hand-washing, for instance, is considered the primary procedure in preventing the spread of infection.     It is accompanied today by the  ever-present Purell container which assists in establishing a border around disease.

My curiosity has to do with the potential use of the word prophylactic in non-medical circumstances.  My temptation would be to use the word to describe the use of spell-check, for instance, which, if used prior to hitting the publish button, can prevent a spelling or grammar error.

Even in the midst of a piece of fiction, the word has a potential use which is colorful and adds an interesting quality to a sentence:

“Before he entered the darkened building, however, Randy exercised a prophylactic caution, driving around the block several times to be assured that there were no obvious surprises waiting for him.   The last thing he needed was to discover that his plan had been leaked and there was someone waiting for him inside.”

I think that works.  Clearly it has nothing to do with birth control.  

Photo Credit: Bettencourt

Someone online the other day was critical of Martha Stewart for repeating a column and illustration she had prepared a year or so ago.  The gist of the criticism was that it was disingenuous of Ms  Stewart to repeat a previously-published piece without identifying it as such.  Hmmmm.    That’s an interesting way of taking a shot at the highly-successful author, TV personality, business owner, and public personality.  There are lots of ways of doing that, but criticizing a re-purposing of an article seems like a cheesy one.

Some time ago a very successful free-lance writer told me that she regularly scans her past postings and articles and thinks through how they might be used in a different way today.  That’s re-purposing.   For instance, she  had spent considerable time in Italy as a younger woman and had written articles about her experience there.   In re-visiting them she discovered that she had written about various food discoveries that were re-cast as culinary articles and marketed to culinary magazines successfully.   Visits to unique inns and hotels were re-worked and submitted successfully to travel magazines.  There were any number of other ways in which she could benefit from former articles.

I’m impressed with that kind of creative marketing.   It’s no easy job for writers to get published regularly.   But re-purposing previous work makes all kinds of sense.  If it’s good, let it be available.

The key to it is thinking creatively about the content of one’s previous work.  Maybe the rental of a special car while on a trip becomes an article for an automotive magazine.   An economic way of experimenting with hotels while traveling can find its way into a senior citizen monthly.   A previously-shared experience of the emotion involved in dropping a child off at camp for the first time becomes a feature article for a parenting magazine.  A credit card fiasco while traveling finds its way into a magazine devoted to the economy.   Who knows?

Re-purposing is not only acceptable, but it is commendable.  I have a favorite illustration for Hallowe’en which came to my attention several years ago.   Every year, now, when I get to that holiday I search for a new one, but end up repeating it because it is so great.   Every year I get positive comments about it.  For some people it is fresh and new.  For others, they remind me of how much they enjoy seeing it again.  It’ll make my blog on Hallowe’en again this year, all things being equal

Maybe the complaint about Martha Stewart’s article was that Ms Stewart didn’t acknowledge it as a repeat.   Maybe.

Illustration Credit: iconarchive.com

The late 60′s and early 70′s were my cultural puberty.   I was still quite fuzzy and I hadn’t yet developed my adult voice.  I was in the process of becoming culturally aware and my attempts at demonstrating it were fumbled and awkward.

It was during that era that a phenomenon covered his country that has come to be known as the emergence of a counter-culture that challenged the norms and created chaos in the lives of families and communities.   Society didn’t quite know what to do with it, and neither did I.   I was surrounded by it, enveloped by it, and admiring of it.   But my bell-bottomed pants looked silly on me and if my hair got too long it drove me crazy until I cut it back to my normal style.  I was not a Woodstock person, didn’t understand the protest movement, and walked on eggshells when it came to making a serious political statement.

Slowly, ever so slowly, my comfort level with counter-culture increased.  But by the time I came to embrace much of the philosophy, theology, and political theory of the counter-culture it was somewhat the norm.  The established culture had found itself in agreement with much of what had been jarring just a decade earlier.   The differences between the culture and the counter-culture were less well defined.

I had forgotten what it was like to be confronted by ideas and concepts that challenged the norm in such an open and defiant way.  But then, last night, I went to a Ford Hall Forum in Boston and spent 90 minutes with the founding editors and writers from the preeminent counter-culture newspaper in Boston, The Real Paper.   As the host said when she concluded the evening, it was exhausting.  The humor, pathos, energy and talent demonstrated by the five originators of the paper was infectious.   They had done something that had never been done before and they did it well.   Just recalling the story created an energy that made me long for those days again.  It took a taxi drive back to South Station to catch my train home before reality began to creep back in and I remembered how difficult and tragic those days were.

The Real Paper was an experiment in truth-telling which had no limiting relationships.   Writers and editors felt no responsibility to soften their words, even if the subject of their articles happened to be someone they agreed with or with whom they had a personal relationship.  But the target of their journalism was the person in a leadership position who was deceiving the public.  Nobody was spared that microscopic discovery.

The question was asked over and over again, “Could The Real Paper happen today? ”

The answer seemed to be that it does happen, but in a different medium.   Social Media has adopted the role which was played by The Real Paper.   Methods and styles which were revolutionary in the 60′s and 70′s are the norm today, and have, to some extent, been adopted even by the culturally-consistent print media.

But the telling comment was from a former Real Paper journalist who said, “It isn’t as easy to identify the enemy today.“  In those days, he said, the enemy was clear.   Vietnam, racial injustice, the Pentagon Papers…these were real and they were visible.  Today’s immoral or illegal cultural issues are masked by their acceptance and employment  by the majority.  The counter-culture is harder to discern and may be single-subject focused.

I found myself energized by the experience of the men and women of the panel.   They were smart.  The years may have changed the color of their hair and the size of their midsection, but the passions they expressed are still vibrant and relevant.   I found myself embarrassed by my willingness to equivocate or seek a safe middle position so as to not disturb a segment of my readers.

As the voice of this nation becomes more and more rigid and isolationist, shutting out dissent and embracing walls rather than building bridges, it makes me wonder if there will arise another counter-culture voice.  If so, it won’t be able to model itself after The Real Paper … in the sense that it won’t be able to be a print newspaper with a limited circulation.   But the social media instruments which are becoming the voice of the people may become the means by which a counter-culture, not seeing itself dependent upon the dominating leadership, speaks out again.  If not its method, but The Real Paper’s  passion and its values may prove to be a mentoring phenomenon.

Photo Credit: digitalrich

Paucity is one of those words that easily could be exaggerated by misunderstanding the true meaning.   If someone says that their refrigerator is absolutely empty and their cupboards are bare, it is inappropriate to say they have a paucity of food.  The truth is that they are food-less.  If there was a paucity of food they might have a box of crackers on the shelf, or a partial bottle of milk in the refrigerator.

Bryan Garner, in his classic resource book, Garner’s Modern American Usage, says:

“The word indicates a small quantity, not a complete lack of something, as this sentence erroneously suggests: It would have had the inevitable result of demonstrating the total paucity or lack [read lack or absence] of evidence from which any jury could conclude that the reasonable man would have acted as the appellant did.”

The suggestion is that there was no evidence, not a paucity. I suspect that it is a common error by writers who are attempting to describe the vacuum of evidence in a case which is being presented.

It is too easy for a writer to embrace a flawed term when grasping for a good expression.  I have found that I am more inclined that ever to run to Dictionary.com to check out the word before committing myself to it.  It only takes a few seconds, and I can’t count the number of times when I have found that my choice was not a good one.  It has saved me from the embarrassment of needing to be corrected by a careful reader. (I also have taken to running Spell Check before hitting the publish button.)

But, to get back to paucity, I want to promote the word as being a really good term to be used.   A few potential uses:

• The Republican Party has no paucity of potential candidates. It’s just a matter of the capability of winning by those presenting themselves.
• The President laments the paucity of successes in diminishing the unemployment numbers in America.
• The Red Sox have demonstrated that they have no paucity of strong bats in this 2011 season.
• The paucity of good movies at the beginning of the summer was overcome by some late-summer blockbusters.

You get the point.  No need to beat a dead horse.  Believe me, when it comes to words capable of being included in a posting, I have no paucity of  resources.

Photo Credit: http://persuasiveweb.wordpress.com/tag/scarcity/

I have an unusual habit of reaching for my BlackBerry first thing in the morning and scanning the news before starting to stir.  It gives my wife a little respite before her alarm.

There are several sites (apps) to which I go, including The New York Times. Even though I will scour the pages in real time later in the morning, I like to get a head start on what’s happened overnight.

This morning I read all of the Opinion articles on the site and found them to be particularly interesting.  More so than usual.  Of course, the “hot topic” was the debt ceiling fiasco in Washington.   What struck me today (more than usual) was the use of metaphors to describe various aspects of the people involved and their various situations.

David Barash of The University of Washington, wrote an op-ed piece called “Washington’s Rogue Elephants” in which he describes what happens to a bull elephant when he is in must, a word we would ordinarily understand to mean when his testosterone is raging through his system.  He becomes almost crazy, Barash says,  and is not to be toyed with.  He says the bull will “…behave with violent abandon, taking risks and defying the basic rules of pachyderm propriety….” I found his description of the behavior of the bull in must to be strangely familiar.    At one point he says, “Facing an elephant in must, other elephants — not to mention people — are well advised to get out of the way.”

Bringing the metaphor into today’s circumstances, Barash says, “…it’s fair to conclude that Mr. Obama is facing the political equivalent of an elephant in musth (sic) — a player who simply won’t play the game.”

Thomas Friedman chooses to go in another direction, preferring to think about what might have been if things were different in the near past.  He employs a metaphor, however, that is jarring.  Referring to the impact of the Tea Party movement on the Republican Party, he says, “…If  sane Republicans do not stand up to this Hezbollah faction in their midst, the Tea Party will take the G.O.P. on a suicide mission.” His depiction of the Tea Party as an out-of-control segment of the party is shared by others, but the use of the term Hezbollah creates a hot button that jumps out at the reader.  There is no question about what Friedman means by his use of the word.

And then I read Maureen Dowd whose acerbic pen (or laptop) can raise the hairs on your neck on a regular basis.  But today I found myself enveloped by her words.   Particularly when she makes a metaphoric reference to the Tea Party as the “Taliban Wing” of the Republican Party.   Bang! Pop! Boom! Crash! There it was again. A depiction of the Tea Party in terms not frequently employed.  The press has been somewhat cozy with the shenanigans of the Tea Party, seeing them as a “burr under the saddle” or “pebble in the shoe” of the Republicans.

The tide has turned on the perception of this band of enthusiastic, energetic, and mouthy band of nay-sayers.  But simply identifying the metaphors is insufficient.  It is important to remember that a bull elephant in must, the Hezbollah, and the Taliban are not to be taken lightly.  They are dangerous, out of control much of the time, and deadly.    In today’s Op-Eds the 800 pound gorilla in the living room has been exposed.

(Can you believe the number of metaphors I have used in this posting?)

Photo Credit: TE Tomas

You’ll have to forgive me.  I just returned from a bookstore where they had advertised a book signing and reading by a regional author.  I had decided earlier that I wouldn’t go, having sampled the book and finding it less than inspirational.  But … I remember the times I’ve sat there waiting for someone to show up so the evening wasn’t a total waste.  Ultimately I decided to go, and I was one of three people who have up a beautiful New England evening to sit in a folding chair for an hour.

It was awful.

The author/writer spoke like she wrote.  It was jumbled, lacked a vision, and was clearly unplanned.   The author ended up having a one-on-one conversation with a man in the front row (there were three of us … one in each row.  Their conversation was about regional gossip, which was only tangentially related to the theme of the book.  I fidgeted in my chair for a half hour before standing and leaving.

It has taken me years to feel comfortable doing such a thing.  In the past I would have suffered through the entire evening so I didn’t embarrass the author.   No longer.

The author should have been embarrassed by the book, not by my leaving the bookstore.

There are hundreds of thousands of people “out there” who have decided to write a book.  Given the ease of publishing today, there is an opportunity for anyone to get a book into print.  My first publication was relatively easy.  But it was also premature, immature, and is now a source of embarrassment for me.  My term is “I rushed to publication.”

Just because someone has an idea doesn’t mean that it is something that is supposed to be in print for people to purchase.  Maybe it’s just an article for a newspaper or a magazine.  Or maybe it’s just a story to be told online using one of the many social media opportunities available today.  It may not be a book.

Clearly, this author I met tonight had an interesting concept that she enjoyed researching and writing about.  But her book was not worth the money I paid for it.  Her defense of the book tonight was just as lame.

An author, to me, is a title given to someone who has developed skills in writing and has passed the test of publication.  Everyone who writes a story isn’t an author, according to my standard.  It’s like a chef.  A chef is someone with training and credential who sees cooking as a profession and an art form.   Everyone who can cook hamburgers or grilled cheese sandwiches is not a chef.

It’s the same with authors. Tonight I wasted my time listening to someone who had a story to tell, but who didn’t trust herself enough to put it to the test of editing by a professional editor.

Oh, well, so much for an evening.   On to bigger and better things.

Graphic Credit: http://uphillwriting.org/2011/01/21/authors-platform-part-2/