Wow, What Meals We Had*

I thought that since I had told you about the time I figured out how to get Colleen to holiday dinners on time, I would tell you my other holiday solution story. Particularly since it also involved recognizing that what I was doing wasn't working and shifting from complaining/talking to acting.

My grandfather's side of the family hails from the deep south. Lovely people in many respects, but very southern about race. My mother couldn't seem to get over the fact that other races existed and called them by various derogatory names. Over the years Forrest, Colleen, and I all three tried to get her to stop. We told her it humiliated us. That it made her look petty and ugly. That we couldn't believe she could use such cruel words. Nothing worked.

And then one Thanksgiving, when the table was full of relatives and my friend Linda, Mama said something about a black man, calling him what no one should call another person. And, instead of telling her how I felt about it, I was struck by inspiration, and said, very loudly and very clearly, two compound nouns of a sexual nature that I don't think had ever been spoken at my mother's table before. Shocked silence. Mama then took up her conversation, as though my venture into Tourette's hadn't occurred. Pretty soon she said something about a Mexican woman, calling her an equally nasty word. And I repeated my earlier comment. Well, I think I reversed it this time -- the first time it had been xying cder, and this time it was cding xyer. Again shock, again carrying on as though it hadn't happened.

However, a couple of days before Christmas Mama called Linda, who had been invited to share that meal with the family, and asked her if she could control my mouth.** Linda's answer was that the only person who could control my mouth was Mama, which Mama didn't get.

So, there we were at Christmas dinner, same cast as before, and Mama used her black person word again, and I repeated my original response. This time Mama decided that she had to do something about it and said, "Joy, you mustn't use words like that." And I responded, "Mama, I only use them when you use your filthy words. But, from now on I'm going to use them every time you use your filthy words. Because, no matter how much my words embarrass you, it is nothing to how much your words embarrass me."

Problem solved. My mother may still use those words, but not in front of me.

* Change of title from Julie's comment.
** How Mama thought she could do that I have no idea.

Uhmmm, Uhmmm, You Know, The Whatzit

*
As I've mentioned, I was the Ultimate Oney-Oney when I was little. The oldest child of two oldest children, and for five years the only child**, the only grandchild, the only great-grandchild, and the only niece. I was the center of the universe, the child who only had to breathe to endear herself to a passel of relatives. One set of great-grandparents had been teachers, and everyone in the family was bookish and valued education. I impressed my family by learning things. Counting and reading and nursery rhymes. Songs and stories and jokes. The way to command even more attention than I already got by the simple act of being there, was to talk.

And I was a great talker. Verbal to the point of garrulous. Big words were a big hit, so I practically fed at the dictionary. If I didn't know what a word meant, I would ask, and when I was old enough, I would look it up. Added to all of the talking and reading aloud that people did with me, I taught myself to read when I was four, and there came a bunch more words. I always read in advance of my age, and I was as apt to use a word from one of those books as one that I heard at the dinner table.

I love words. I have always prided myself on my vocabulary. On knowing the exactly correct word to convey the slightest shading of meaning. On being able to come out with a dozen synonyms. It was my very best thing.

So, you can imagine how frustrating it is that I sometimes have to wait and excavate for a word. That, at times, it is hours or even days before the correct term presents itself. If I can't think of the word when I need it, it just haunts me until I do get it. I go around feeling that empty space on my tongue where a word is supposed to be until it finally comes out and gives itself up. Sometimes days later. Often in the middle of the night, so that I wake up to go to the bathroom and suddenly there it is! "Aha!" I exclaim in victory, "Table! That's what that thing you eat your meals on is! Table!"

Oh, yes. That's the other frustrating thing about it. It is seldom something like complementary schizmogenesis that I forget. Oh, no. Not a term that there might be some excuse for forgetting. It is so often a simple word like table or carrot or tonsil. A word I've known forever.

* Image from The Visual Thesaurus.
** Other than an older half-brother and sister, who we seldom saw, and a brother who died when I was three.

Getting It Right

On a couple of blogs, there are discussions going on about the sloppiness of the press. Of how newspapers rarely correct their errors, even when they have been informed. Of how often things are misspelled. Like names in obituaries.

It made me think about when I worked as a research analyst for the Alaska State Legislature. Every report we sent out was edited and re-edited. Even the department head, the best editor I met in my life, had her stuff checked. We ran spell check. We counted the spaces between words and after periods.* We did the math on any numbers. We fact checked on facts we thought we already knew. We made sure that the points were made in the same logical order in the introduction, the body, and the conclusion. We had one staff member who was familiar with the issue check it and one who was not. We measured cells in tables. We checked for uniform style in lists. We read things out loud and backwards. If our reports hadn't been confidential, we would have pulled in a smart 12 year old (because most people know as much about other people's fields as a smart 12 year old, so if the kid had questions, so would the legislator)**. Even then, once in a while I would pick up something I had written two months prior and discover an error that just leapt off the page and whacked me. Something that had sneaked past at least three readers. Luckily they were minor errors, but still it was humbling.

Never as bad as the formal report that I saw turned in by an engineering firm about the Department of Pubic Works. Or, in the days before spell check, the day I was looking over a communications handout my partner Alison and I had distributed to at least 300 people over four years and saw that it said "for best resluts . . . " Not only did we hand that out, we used to pick it up and use it as an outline to make sure we hadn't missed any points.

* We still used the two spaces after a period rule. We still used serial commas. We still held ourselves to very high standards.

** When my kids were 12, they proofed all of my training handouts for me, until they knew too much about those subjects from proofing prior handouts. Some of my best stuff was a result of being vetted by Richard and Julie.