Enlightening "lightning"

The air has been miserable. Hot, humid, Ozone Level Orange, depressing, oppressive, enervating, and full of mosquitos. Late August in Dallas. Dark clouds pile up. We get one loud crash of thunder, and six raindrops sizzle on the sidewalk. That's it. Show's over. Move along, folks.



It's enough to make me very cranky about spelling. Before the thunder, there was a flash of lightning. Not "lightening", as I see so often in print. I haven't had a flash of lightening since the birth of my youngest son.

Lightening occurs about two weeks before labor when the fetus lowers into the maternal pelvis, engaging for childbirth. It seems appropriate to point that out on this Labor Day weekend. The pregnant woman feels a slight lessening of abdominal distension when this occurs. Of course, she may also feel like the Thanksgiving wishbone about to be pulled apart.

Lightning is a discharge of atmospheric electricity. Not the same thing.

I'm pleased to report that lightening is also a laser method of removing tattoos, a very good thing. To use it in a sentence, "The trained medical professional is lightening LeRoy's lightning bolt tattoo that he got in Leavenworth," is a very proper and applaudable use of the word.

To lighten is to illuminate or brighten; to decrease the weight or load; to lessen the oppressiveness; or to move through the value scale from black to gray to white.

To lighten up is an idiom meaning to relax, to become less serious and more cheerful. It will be possible when the weather changes and proofreading returns to Earth!

For now, I've put The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys in the cd player. Spell it right or leave me alone.

Sometimes I feel like I'm fading away

You're looking at me, I've got nothing to say

Don't make me angry with the games that you play

Either light up or leave me alone

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Found House

Hansel and Gretel found a house in the forest. It was built of candy and belonged to a witch with gourmet culinary aspirations.



The Dallas Morning News found a house, too.



© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Addition Solutions

Tired teacher flips through Mitt Romney issue of Newsweek on the train. Most of the printed material isn't really sinking in. The magazine is just a prop to yawn behind and to create a sci fi force field against unacceptable seatmates. Then a recognized word. Addition. Addition solutions. A special advertising section of "Addition Solutions" is proclaimed for abaci? Flash cards?

Why are the expensive ads in the middle of this slick weekly national news magazine all for substance abuse clinics and treatment centers ? Where are the ads for No Child Left Counting On Their Little Piggy Toes?



About five a.m. she'd sent out an email for near and dear about the site wear [sic] her spider photos could be viewed. So embarrassing to realize the misspelling! Wishing she'd been paid as much for her mistake as the maker of the Newsweek goof. Proofreading is so very important!

© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Why spelling is still important

SpellCheck cannot tell you how to pack your duffel bag for a weekend getaway:

The Woolly Mammoth emailed his fretting mama from Italy to say he is alive and well. He wrote that he spent last weekend "on a beach near the town of Grossotto." I was quick to Google "Grossotto," which is in the mountains near the Swiss/Italian border. No beach in sight. High on a hill with a lonely surfboard, Layee odl, layee odl layee-oo!

Grossotto is the home of a solar park, a large array of solar photovoltaic collection panels used to turn sunlight into power. It's probably a good place to catch some rays, but not necessarily to watch bikini volleyball.

Studying the map of Italy hanging above the kitchen sink while loading my dishwasher, I'm guessing the Woolly Mammoth went to a beach near the town of Grosseto. Grosseto is near the sea and close to his study center. It sounds like a better place for swim goggles than for Google.

My travel budget is for a weekend getaway to Gross-out-oh, Texas. That's where you find old men in Speedos holding sheets of HyVee store brand aluminum foil while beached in webbed lawn chaises after the Senior Swim at the city natatorium. Do walruses get sunburned?

One little student is working on the phonetic "G" sound . He has pictures of a goose, a goat, and a garbage can:

Guh, guh, guh, juice.
Guh, guh, guh, goat.
Guh, guh, guh, trash!

The Woolly Mammoth might oughta maybe better check the spelling before he departs next weekend. He's going to look like severe juice goat trash wearing a Grossotto parka at the Grosseto beach.

© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Oh, Gorsh!

My youngest student, when reminded to flush and wash, says, "Oh, Gorsh!," with his hands on his face. He mutters, "Goll durn it," while he tries to straighten out his jeans that got turned sideways in the stall, then marches back in to push the handle that causes that loud, scary flushing noise.



Oh, gorsh! I remember the coin-operated bucking bronco at the Hinky Dinky gorshrey store. Occasionally Mom would give us money to ride the horse while she pushed her shopping cart around getting the Campbell's cream of mushroom, Weaver's potato chips, Sorry Charlie tuna, charcoal bricquets, and shattered wheat cereal for my Dad. Usually we just rode on the metal railings between the checkout lines near the display of mittens, ice-scrapers, and accordian-folded clear plastic rain "bonnets" in their handy carrying cases.

Mom got the huge round cartons of All detergent for the worshing machine. We used the cartons as horses when we played cowboys in the basement while Mom sewed and ironed. We slapped the backs of our pretend horses because the Father of Our Country had a "slapping stallion". It was very embarrassing when I learned to spell and found out George was Washington, not Warshington. And so, spelling became a civilizing force in This Great Country of Ours.

Of course a horse is a horse. Maybe Mr. Ed should run for president, and corral that bunch up in Warshington:

Go right to the source and ask the horse
He’ll give you the answer that you’ll endorse.
He’s always on a steady course.
Talk to Mister Ed.


There was Captain Washington
Upon a slapping stallion
A-giving orders to his men
I guess there was a million.

Yankee Doodle, keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with the girls be handy. *

For decades I've been confused thinking the Marx Toy spring-action riding Mustang was "Marvo". The Sixties were a groovy, marvy time. The mangled ad jingle pops into my mind whenever I watch Dubya down at the Crawford ranch:

Marvo the Mustang; he's almost For Real!

I'm set straight now. It was "Marvel the Mustang". Marvel has his own virtual online museum. The current retro remakes don't get very good reviews from toy-buying grandparents. Seems things get less "for real" all the time. Oh, gorsh!

* (Sounds like a Viagra ad!)

R.I.P. cord

"The report of my death was an exaggeration."

Mark Twain
New York Journal, June 2, 1897

It is mid-September, always a depressing time in North Texas. Summer shows few signs of abating, with our humidity and temps creating heat index levels over one hundred degrees. Students are still wearing those *@#%! flip-flops and spaghetti strap tops. The hummingbirds are gone, but the rats are happy and healthy. I've spent half an hour trying to track down a television public service announcement I remember from childhood. It was a very dismal black and white video of a small child calling, "Here, kitty, kitty" to the rat in his crib.

I assumed that rats were something found only in folk tales and ghettos for most of my life. In recent years I learned that large rodents don't just flee the sinking ship. They live equally at home in our lower middle class condo complexes and in your hoity toity country clubs. Rats will be living large on Earth, along with cockroaches, many millennia after we humans have ceased choosing between paper and plastic. Still, that's not as personally depressing as the delay of corduroy weather, and the death of proofreading.

If it's too hot for spectators to wear corduroy pants to the high school football game, the season has started way too early. If the Dallas Symphony Orchestra website has spelling errors, again the season has started way too early. Shostakovich did not compose "Word War II" symphonies using Scrabble tiles. He wrote symphonies about World War II.

Most of the early childhood teachers and care-givers attending the Appelbaum continuing education workshop at the Mockingbird/I35 Radisson today were unmoved by the typographical errors in the workbook for the session. What is going on? Guardians of the arts and education can't put a professional product out there for we itty-bitty, mighty tired parents and customers?

I'm hoping the reported death of proofreading has been greatly exaggerated. Probably can't fit in my corduroy, anyway.

Hot Collage Gals

Misspellers* around the globe search for explicit photos of university coeds and stumble onto this blog. That's the problem with Boolean keyword search engines. Even during nineteen straight days of temps over one hundred degrees (Fahrenheit not Celsius), there's a world of difference in this big old Lone Star State of Texas between UT Longhorn sand volleyball bikini babes, and hot-flashing middle-aged Collin County mixed-media artists with three grown sons.

Four skills never go out of style:

1. Spelling
2. Keyboarding, or, as we warm gals call it, typing
3. Proofreading, or attention to detail
4. Punctuation (meaning cannot exist without form)

You can't depend on Spell Czech. Those Prague Mamas are probably hot, too. The Kingdom of Bohemia may be one of those European countries lacking in ice cubes, but I can't research that right now. My main concern is the age at which a woman crosses the line from girl to gal.

Wikipedia doesn't consider age connotations of female synonyms:

The word girl has many synonyms, including "belle", "chick", "doll", "gal", "lass" or "lassie", "maiden", and "miss". The slang word "gal", as in "Buffalo gals won't you come out tonight", is a variant pronunciation of girl.

In my search for enlightenment, I slogged through a mucky slough of academic jargon before finding a flicker of clarity:

In all University settings, members of the University community should:

1. Use gender equivalent construction. Equivalent or parallel construction should be used for males and females. Thus, if males are referred to as “men,” females should be referred to as “women,” not as “girls” or “ladies.”

2. Use alternatives to the masculine singular pronoun for generic singular. The masculine singular pronoun traditionally has been used as the generic singular. Such usage fails to acknowledge the participation of women in human activity unless they are specifically identified. Alternatives to the use of “he,” “him,” and “his” for the generic singular are he/she, she/he, her/him, him/her, hers/his, his/hers or one’s. Some individuals may prefer to alternate the use of the male and female singular pronoun to indicate generic singular. While some alternatives may seem awkward when they are first used, they become comfortable with usage and will, as any other language construction, become second nature in time. It is this natural incorporation of women into language on an equal basis with men that is the purpose of non-sexist language usage. [I don't have the slightest idea what this means, but it sounds kinkier** than the title of this post!]....

...6. Exhibit non-patronizing, non-condescending ways of describing and addressing women, particularly women in traditional occupations, e.g., secretaries, clerks, nurses. Both men and women should be sensitized to the negative effects which result from usage of terms such as “girl,” “gal,” “coed,”, “girl Friday,” the “girls in the office,” and the like.

I'm happy to report my discovery of Ruth Walker's "Words On the Move" column in the Christian Science Monitor***. I'll be checking in often for my language usage fix:

There are plenty of colloquialisms for "female person": They start with terms like "chick" and go on through terms you aren't going to read in this space. What they have in common is that they define women as "the other," in a way that terms like "guy" or "bloke" do not define men. When Simone de Beauvoir called her book about women "The Second Sex," people knew what she meant.

There's "gal," which isn't to everyone's taste. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as a "vulgar or dial. pronunciation of 'girl.'" (The Compact Oxford is somewhat more forgiving, defining it as an informal, chiefly North American term for "girl or young woman." In practice, "gal" has a rather flexible upward age limit; see "Golden Girls," above.) "Gal Friday," or " girl Friday," has worked its way into the language as a takeoff on "Man Friday," itself a phrase of dubious political correctness. Nowadays "his girl Friday" may well be the executive vice president for strategy and human resources. But why was it ever OK for the counterpart of "man" to be "gal," anyway?

*Yes, I checked two dictionaries on this one! Gals, your dictionary is your friend in a way that the masculine singular pronoun for generic singular never could be. Now excuse me. I have a volleyball game at seven.

**This blog has no opinion at the moment on the independent candidacy of Kinky Friedman for governor of Texas. I've read some of his books, but didn't think them as funny as he did. By the way, that's what my dad says about the guys on Car Talk.

***Some other day we will ponder the resemblance between 2004 Inductee Baseball Hall of Famer Paul Molitor, one of my favorite players, and monitor lizards, who swallow their prey whole.

Missing the smell of red rubber bands

What's black and white, and read all over? OR is your newspaper too red state? Feeling blue? I'm frustrated, too.

I am so close to ending my delivery of the Dallas Morning News! Not because of its political bias, poor proofreading, new format, or delayed deliveries. It's the information to recycling ratio that is bugging me. Newspapers need advertising. That is the nature of the game. Still, I'm beginning to think subscribing to paperless news sources is more earth-friendly.

I already get the New York Times headlines online every morning. I pay a small fee to see the full text of Maureen Dowd, and to have access to the wonderful video slideshows about art exhibits. What if I paid the $34.95 annual fee to get the NYTimes crossword puzzle online?

The newspaper experience has deteriorated across most of the senses over the past thirty years. Editors and art directors have been messing with the format of our newspapers for so long that I have to squint at my memories to see the glorious black and white parade of narrow columns on the stiff, slightly yellow newsprint that crackled just so when you turned the page.

I equated our newspaper's lack of color with a Joe Friday consciousness--Just the facts, ma'am.
What is it I really want from a local morning newspaper?

• The chance to sit in bed from 6:15-6:45 a.m. wrapped in a quilt, drinking coffee and turning pages.
• The NYTimes crossword puzzle
• Doonesbury
• Zits
• One Big Happy
• Bizarro
• Get Fuzzy
• Dilbert
• Scott Burns' financial columns
• Scott Cantrell's arts reviews
• The weekly Guide to events, performances, exhibits, and restaurants

How much is the quilt/hot coffee experience worth in pounds carried to the recycing cart?

No Chidl Left Benihana

This country is experiencing a disastrous shortage of an essential resource the likes of which this Mama has not seen since the Carter Administration. I'm not referring to El Busho's belated request for citizens to conserve gasoline after the hurricanes, or to the search for untapped spelling words above the Arctic Circle. Don't even get me started on SUVs!

I could easily rant from now until breakfast about the complete lack of competent help at Comp USA, and of cashiers at Super Target. Why does the store have twenty-four check-out lanes, but only three cashiers?

Tonight's rant, my chidlern, is that this formerly grate country of hours is bereft of spellers and devoid of those old maid schoolteachers, like my great aunt Em, who paid attention to these tiny civilizing details. Many times every day some raging hormonal nitwit connects to CollageMama's ramblings while searching for "collage males naked" or "hot collage mamas". I want to slap them all on the knuckles with my ruler, and send them back to the McGuffey Reader, but that will only bring on a new readership of "collage ruler slapping" spelling-impaired deviants. Plus, I want them to work out 754.9 divided by 17.3 in long division at the blackboard and stay inside from recess. Who is paying for these Googlers to attend college? They must be buying the face paint and cheese heads in bulk at Costco.

I don't care much what they do or say, as long as they Google it properly. Henry Higgins would have a stroke.

Look at her, a prisoner of the gutters
Condemned by every syllable she utters
By right she should be taken out and hung,
For the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue...

This is what the British population
Calls an elementary education...
It's 'ow' and 'garn' that keep her in her place,
Not her wretched clothes and dirty face.

Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?
This verbal class distinction, by now, should be antique.
[To Pickering] If you spoke as she does, sir, instead of the way you do,
Why you might be selling flowers too...

Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?
Norwegians learn Norwegian, the Greeks are taught their Greek
In France every Frenchman knows his language from 'A' to 'Zed' -
The French don't care what they do, actually, as long as they pronounce it properly.
Arabians learn Arabian with the speed of summer lightning.
The Hebrews learn it backwards which is absolutely frightening.
Use proper English, you're regarded as a freak.
Oh, why can't the English -
Why can't the English learn to speak?

col-lage (ko-lazh') n. An artistic composition of materials and objects pasted over a surface, often with unifying lines and color. [French, from coller, to glue, paste, from colle, glue, from Vulgar Latin colla (unattested), from Greek kolia. See kolei- in Appendix.*)

And I can attest to the vulgarity of the whole misspelled business!

Clean-up detail

Brrakkk! I know there are misspellings and choppy sentences lurking in the muddy, fetid waters of my blog. I am horrified and mortified and alligatorized.

Apparently some Vulcan on the Blogger Stardeck has decided there will be no editing today. I can post, but not edit.

Don't expect me to sleep well tonight. Whenever I manage to drift off, I'll be visited by the nagging, nipping reptiles of revision.

Did I ever mention my 7th-8th grade honors English teacher, Miss Madsen? She's the one who used to throw collegiate dictionaries at us. Her mustache would twitch and her eyebrows would do the Groucho Marx thing. She would stomp her old lady shoe heels, and glare the Samuel Jackson glare. Heaven help you if you dropped a pencil on the floor in her class.

I'm sorry, but IT'S NOT MY FAULT. Please give me a pass to the nurse. I feel a nosebleed coming on.

Is the spell broken?

In March my son was in an accident while driving his father's van. In April my son bought his precious Nissan 300ZX. In May my ex-husband's wife backed into my son's precious Nissan 300ZX.

When I call my Farmer's agent and tell them my name, I hear a click-click-click in the background. LeAnne has set the desk stress pendulum balls in motion.

I know a ridiculous amount about LeAnne. I know her work schedule and her days to attend classes. I know her dog, Cassius, and can enquire about his surgery. I know that the stitches didn't dissolve, but Cassius was very cooperative when LeAnne decided to remove the stitches herself. I congratulate LeAnne on getting her degree with honors this week after six years.

Things rarely go smoothly in my auto insurance experience, so I am glad to have the same cast of characters when I have a problem. They owe me, and I owe them.

When I divorced, I dealt with car insurance for the first time. In this sci-fi frontier I encountered Jerry. Jerry set up my policy on my Mazda MPV. This seemed to be pretty painless and straight-forward. Alas, Jerry had typed my name as "Uncwy" instead of Nancy. After a few months I received a double rejection notice. Uncwy was rejected because she didn't actually exist (a minor detail), and Nancy was rejected because she drove her car into a neighbor's swim pool. I was thrown into the insurance dungeon, chained to the wall, left alone with the rats and a crust of bread.

It took about six months to get Uncwy rehabilitated and renamed, and Jerry nearly got fired in the process. Then it took six more to convince the insurance gods that Nancy's ex was the one who let his car roll down the driveway, across the alley, and into the neighbor's pool. While this was just a normal day for him, Nancy actually had a spotless driving record, and should be reinstated.

About this time, my oldest son became a driver, and I was introduced to Male Driver Under Age 25 insurance reality. Within a month of obtaining his license, Son One drove the van into the support post of the carport. Having done the same thing at the same age, I sympathized. Alas, I also paid, and paid, and paid.

Everytime I add or subtract a Male Driver Under Age 25, or a male driver's vehicle from my policy I hear the click-click-click. Cassius has to wear the veterinary lampshade around his neck, and LeAnne has to set the pendulum balls in motion.

News from the education fornt

On a sad note, the high school marquee says "THANKSGIVING BRAKE 11/26".