People With Small Vocabularies Also Have Small. . . . Brains. *
I can’t help but wonder if all this brouhaha about dumbing down the vocabulary in classic literature right now has at least part of its origin in the sad fact that many of our parents and teachers can’t understand the big words.
This isn’t funny; it’s unforgiveable.
The more words we know, the better able we are to communicate with others and to understand others. Literate people have three vocabularies, as I tell my students each semester. One is relatively small; one is medium-sized, and one is quite large. Think “The Three Bears.”
Our smallest vocabulary is our speaking vocabulary. The middle-sized vocabulary is our writing vocabulary. Our largest vocabulary is – or at least, is supposed to be – our reading vocabulary.
That is, our reading vocabulary is large unless the dumbing-down PC police have stuck their white-out pens into other peoples’ business.
The only person who has the right to change a piece of writing is the writer. Period. If you are so over-sensitive and culturally illiterate that you are offended because back in a certain period of history, people spoke and acted in a particular way, and you don’t want anybody to know about it because it hurts your feelings even though it was quite ordinary for the times, and you’re unable, due to your low brain cell count, to create a valuable lesson with such facts, you’re batshit stupid. I pity your poor children. I hope you’re not a teacher.
And if you belong to the school of thought that still thinks that “soporific” is a word that small children can’t handle and you want it removed from Beatrix Potter’s “The Tale of Peter Rabbit,” there are no words in any thesaurus to adequately describe your ignorance.
I despise you.
* As for the title, it’s absolutely true, and such people’s brains aren’t the only small body part they’re sporting. This is, of course, an opinion, but I firmly believe that people who advocate censorship are considerably unendowed in every other area, as well.
Censorship comes in all kinds of guises, all of them disgusting. Equally disgusting is our population’s growing lack of cultural literacy.
Omens, Witch-burning, and Fools
Mamacita says: Second day of class, and we’re buried alive in snow, so much so that even the college canceled classes.
I don’t believe in omens, but I can’t help thinking, “omen.”
I did what I usually do on a snow day: I slept. That is because I am an exciting, energetic bundle of cool, who utilizes every moment of existence in a lively and positive manner.
I’m also a night owl, a vampire, a lover of darkness, the night sky, owls, and bats.
In another time and place, I’d have been burned as a witch, except that witch-burning is mostly a rumor, not a fact. The frightened, uneducated, mostly illiterate believers in a handful of men’s personal interpretations of scripture might have dunked, pressed, or, at best, branded me, though.
We like to think such times, people, and thinking are over, but, sadly, they’re not, because we run into frightened, uneducated and mostly illiterate people all the time, as they follow and praise a handful of men’s personal interpretations of scripture. And you know good and well that such people would burn, dunk, press, or brand us all if they thought they could get by with it.
I don’t deal well with fools. Did you know?
Students, I look forward to seeing you NEXT week. Bring your thinking caps and be sure your mind’s eyes are Visined and ready to SEE. Bring your powers of observation, too; you’ll need them. Things are not always as they seem, and this is both good and bad, depending on the. . . . . wait for it. . . . . CONTEXT.
Remember that word.
Did you learn anything interesting today?
Mamacita says: This is five years old, but it’s still a good random sample of my day. Remember, helping students make connections is my “thing,” but it helps when they have something to connect things to. Sometimes I think a good combination of personalities can find connections among/between almost anything. This is wonderful, by the way.
It started with my students asking me if I’d seen “Free Willy” and I said, “Yes, but I really wish they hadn’t let him leap out. Under the circumstances, he was better off contained.” That’s when I found out there’s a porn flick called “Free Willy.” I suppose my comment would be good for either of them.
After we read a series of essays about famous people, it was time to answer questions and make observations. And, most importantly, to make connections.
According to my students, Hitler was once Time’s Man of the Year (absolutely true), while Bono was Time’s Shared Person of the Year. Both deserved the honor, as Hitler was “. . . one bitchin’ evilmeister” and Bono is “. . . a guy who wears sunglasses and wails like a little girl.”
We read a short essay about Einstein and Edison. I asked my students if they saw any irony in the fact that both men are, today, considered to be revered and brilliant scientists. One young man said that he found it ironic that Einstein would be allowed to teach with that freaky hair. Another boy said that he thought it was ironic that Edison was looked up to when his eardrums had exploded and were leaking down his shirt. Plus, he was an arsonist and once blew up a moving train with a chemical mix that went wrong.
Clara Barton was Heidi’s crippled friend, who was taught to walk by goats. Florence Nightingale was one of the Pointer Sisters.
The Wright Brothers are a bluegrass band. (They are, actually, here in southern Indiana.) They built the first airplane out of old bicycles. They weren’t really brothers but lived together in a kind of sin, “sorta like the cowboys in ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ only not cute and not gay and without Anne Hathaway.” They flew their plane on the sand so it would be soft if they crashed.
Steven Jobs makes cool movies. His hobby is tinkering with old computers. He also invented Pixie Stix.
If the Red Cross didn’t persuade our soldiers to chain smoke between skirmishes, our casualty rate would be even higher because the men would be more nervous and jittery and inclined to shoot at random. Like in VietNam. And “Louse.” Men who were stationed in Louse came home with them in their hair. This is what the school nurse in “Billy Madison” was looking for.
Sandra Day O’Connor played Edith on “All in the Family.” Rob Reiner played Meatloaf on this same show, before he became a fat rock singer and directed chick movies like the orgasm scene in “Harry and Sally.”
Sally Ride used to dance with a big bubble to hide her facial expressions. It was the olden days and nobody was looking at her face anyway. Also possibly because she was old. Like, 30 or something.
Marie Curie died of cancer caused by radium on the numbers on her watch. But she wanted to see what time it was even in the dark, and since her husband was a hit and run victim, killing him mortally, she had to tell time somehow.
Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, and he used the cash cow to help other inventors make cool stuff, not necessarily to blow up barns, but sometimes they did. The interest on dynamite has grown really big in the bank, so inventors get a big piece of that when their stuff works and has a buyer.
My students are not stupid. Don’t misunderstand me here. It’s mostly that they are NOT well-read or informed, and have been out of the system for a long time, or are freshly out of a system that did not do well by them. And yes, some of them are dumb as a box of rocks. But they are trying.
Mostly, though, they are cool people, really cool, hardworking people, who are trying desperately to make some ‘connections’ between things they’d heard, and the facts in our short essays. These are some of the results. Only some. It gets better, and it gets worse. However, there is always a connection, however odd it might be. Straightening these things out is one of the things we do.
It just goes to show ya. Don’t believe everything you hear.
