Stranger Than Fiction

The semester is underway, and I’m working to get my “sea legs” back after a slow, peaceful summer. I’m steeling myself in preparation for the many, many essays I’ll be reading, and pondering--again--the evolution of the English language. It’s tempting to say that language is really devolving as students increasingly use texting and Facebook lingo in place of standard English. But I’m old; maybe it IS standard English now.

So I’ve been practicing in front of the mirror, reading aloud the examples below from actual student essays as I closely watch my face, trying to turn my knee-jerk horrified shriek into a calm, benevolent smile. As a side note, I couldn’t agree more with #’s 8, 12, and 14, and I find #’s 2, 6, 15, and 17 particularly ambiguous and creative…

1. I’d just assume not go.
2. She fell deeper and deeper into desparity.
3. I’ll never again take life for granite.
4. Now that I have an in-debt understanding…
5. It’s better to tell the truth, as a pose to lying.
6. I’ll never make that fetal mistake again.
7. I learned a valuable lesion.
8. Doctors should not perspire antidepressants to teens.
9. This will not denture terrorism.
10. They should do more indep back round checks.
11. I’ve put these in craniological order.
12. Parents should not force their children to take piano lesions.
13. Without feather a do, I present my portfolio.
14. Smoking should be banned in all pubic places.
15. Drilling in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge would ruin the beautiful land escape.
16. The wind was abnormally clam.
17. People in the United States live a fast paste lifestyle.
18. Living at home is much more convent than living in the dorms.
19. His brother shows great love and compaction.

20. It was a text box definition of tragedy.

Vocabula Phantasma

Close friends and associates often hear me lamenting (ranting) about the deteriorating state of communication skills among Americans. Well, I've been attending faculty meetings all this week, and I must say that academic dialogue could USE a little deterioration. Aiming primarily to impress one another, academics often speak in a curious language unintelligable to even the most brilliant, well-read, articulate non-academic. I have also attended numerous scholarly presentations over the years, and I can assure you I'm not alone in typically feeling, barely halfway through such an event, that either my yawn reflex is abnormally sensitive, or that my brain was about to explode.

When I was younger, I felt a secret guilt for not embracing academe-ese more wholeheartedly, for not intentionally boosting my stress level to hyper-fried in the practice of these verbal gymnastics. But I'm older now, and I can freely admit using & loving words like "blab" to mean "academic discourse." Still, I feel a compulsion as a college teacher to OWN the vocabulary of scholarship, so I've written this poem in order to get the lion's share of the required vocabulary out of the way in one fell swoop (at one fell swoop, for you Shakespeare scholars). Hope you like it.

WORDS YOU MUST USE IN AN ACADEMIC PRESENTATION,
GIVEN HERE IN ORDER OF IMPORTANCE

There are certain things you must say
in any academic presentation
meant to stir the philosophical
fervor of a circumscribed audience.
In this postmodern conservative
hegemony, tacitly agreed-upon
ideas must be carefully expanded
and articulated vis-à-vis the resurrected
scholarship, indexed and archived,
of any reliable postcolonial ethnocritic
negating the Eurocentric socio-historic
interpretation and incorporating
the semiotics of interpretive punctuation,
then vetted against any known ideas
in the same or similar literary traditions;
hence, a satisfactory Q & A.
Be sure to interject the plausibility
of linguistic fluidity as a rationale
for using words like buttwad or dang.