Macinstruct

Danny Boy

mcone — Sun, 11 May 2008 07:54:04 -0600

Jerome Shea
Sunday, May 11, 2008

Perhaps the best part of my rediscovery of Paul Robeson was listening to his rendition of “Danny Boy.” “I guess it’s not just for tenors anymore,” I mused. We all feel, I think, that Irish tenors have a lock on that perennial favorite. Not so. Basses have sung it. Groups have sung it. Women have sung it—in fact, the man responsible for “Danny Boy” assumed that the singer would be a woman; he even substituted “Eily Dear,” for “Danny Boy,” to accommodate male singers. But these confusions are only a small part of that remarkable song.

In so many ways it is not what it seems.

For one thing, although the haunting melody is probably Irish and centuries old, the lyrics are not. The lyricist—my old Irish heart cringes—was an Englishman! Frederick Weatherly (1848-1929) was a barrister by vocation but a veritable songwriting machine by avocation. He wrote thousands of songs. Some, like “Roses of Picardy,” did well, but “Danny Boy” towers over them all. He first wrote words and music in 1910. That “Danny Boy” was a non-starter. Then, the story goes, his sister-in-law in America sent him the music for “A Londonderry Air,” (or, as wags have it, “London Derriere”). Weatherly had never heard it before but he quickly saw that the words and music were an almost perfect fit. A classic was born.

So we have an authentic (or so most authorities think: nothing is ever settled in these matters) Irish melody with lyrics supplied by an Englishman who, according to dueling sources, either was a frequent visitor to Ireland or never set foot there. Nevertheless, the Irish immediately claimed the song as their own. Well, that’s not true either: there are people on the “ould sod” who have never heard it or heard of it! The ones who did claim the song as their own, as fervently as only expatriates can, were the Irish in America. That’s why many consider it not Irish so much as Irish-American, which is closer to the truth. I have even heard some say that Weatherly was an American. Perhaps they are confusing him with his sister-in-law.

When you think of the Irish in America, you think of two things: “Danny Boy” and St. Patrick’s Day, both of which we throw ourselves into whole-heartedly (some might say maniacally, green beer and all). This is a day when wretched excess rules. Recently, a sort of backlash has begun (good humored, one hopes). One pub owner in New York City has banned the singing of “Danny Boy” on his premises, at least on St. Patty’s Day, when the boys are most inclined to cut loose. “It’s more appropriate for a funeral than for a celebration,” says Shaun Clancy, himself an Irish immigrant, adding that it ranks among “the 25 most depressing songs of all time.” Lachrymose it certainly is. I can easily imagine that that’s where the expression “crying in your beer” came from. Depressing it may be, but beautiful it is, too. So another argument Clancy offers is that he is sick of hearing it butchered by the boyos after they have belted back a few Bushmills. That one I can agree with. As to its being depressing, haven’t we always seen the Irish as championing “happy wars and sad love songs”?

And just what is the song about (because it’s not just a song but a sketch of a story)? Who is this Danny Boy and where is he off to? And who is singing to him? Some assume that, in typical Irish fashion (see above, “happy wars”), he is off to battle. But there is nothing to suggest, as surely there should be, that he might not come back, that he might die for Ireland in glorious battle. Some have suggested that he is escaping the potato famine of the 1840s. But if it is his mother who is singing, what sort of blackguard would leave his own mother behind to starve? Weatherly left few clues, and some suggest that “Danny Boy” is simply a lament for archetypal loss. And in truth, the where or the why doesn’t matter so much as the going. The outlines are there and you can color them in yourself.

And is it his mother singing? That was always my assumption and seems to have been Weatherly’s. In fact, the more I listen to the traditional tenor’s rendition, the more do unworthy thoughts of the homoerotic seem to slip in. (“Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” as Jerry Seinfeld would say.) Oh, and that business about lying six feet under and hearing all the traffic and voices up top? That really creeps me out sometimes. And it’s a real challenge, with that high F (G in the original!) waiting implacably like a judgment. (Of course, that is the note that delivers the chills, too.) It may not be as near-impossible as the “Star Spangled Banner,” but it’s close. But despite its strange provenance, the difficulties of it, the confusions about it, and all the rest, “Danny Boy” is one of the most beautiful and moving pieces ever written, belonging in the very select company of Pachelbel’s “Canon in D Major,” “Amazing Grace,” and a couple more that escape me now.

Because right now, my friends, something else is blocking my brain and misting my eyes:

Oh, Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling
From glen to glen, and down the mountainside,
The summer’s gone, and all the roses falling,
‘Tis you, ‘tis you must go and I must bide.
But come ye back when summer’s in the meadow
Or when the valley’s hushed and white with snow,
‘Tis I’ll be here in sunshine or in shadow.
Oh, Danny Boy, oh Danny Boy, I love you so.

But when ye come, and all the flowers are dying
And I am dead, as dead I well may be,
Ye’ll come and find the place where I am lying
And kneel and say an Ave there for me.
And I shall hear, though soft you tread above me,
And all my dreams will warmer, sweeter be,
For you will bend and tell me that you love me,
And I will sleep in peace until you come to me.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Jerome Shea has served at the University of New Mexico in various capacities for over twenty-five years; in 1995 he joined the English Department as a tenured associate professor. Shea's expertise and interests are in general composition, traditional grammar, stylistics, classical tropes, the history of the language, and professional rhetorics. Email him at shea@macinstruct.com

Paul Robeson

mcone — Sun, 04 May 2008 07:43:08 -0600

Jerome Shea
Sunday, May 5, 2008

Last month I promised you a wonk on Paul Robeson, one of the most remarkable figures of the 20th century. Only one (older) student in my UNM class knew who Paul Robeson was. If that survey is at all representative, I would like to try to remedy it in some small way. Robeson, the whole man, needs to be remembered, and as much for our sake as for his. That would take a book, of course. This wonk will have to do.

My own picture of the man was admittedly sketchy. The magnificent voice, of course, stretching from basso profundo to basso cantante. “Old Man River” was in my memory somewhere, though whether I had ever actually heard a recording of it or just imagined I had is uncertain. I knew that he was multi-talented (though I didn’t know the half of it). Finally, I knew that he became a more and more controversial political figure in his last years, and died a bitter and angry man. If the cliché “larger than life” can ever really apply to anyone, it applies to Paul Robeson.

But first, do yourself a huge favor: get a Robeson CD. You can make your own by downloading iTunes. “Old Man River,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “John Brown’s Body,” “Shenandoah,” “Deep River”—these will get you started. Then find a comfortable chair, shut out the clamoring world, close your eyes, and listen. You will thank me. You’re welcome.

He was born on the 9th of April, 1898, the last child of William Robeson and Maria Louisa Bustill Robeson, in Princeton, New Jersey. His father was a slave who had fled north, graduated from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, and become pastor of the Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church of Princeton (formerly known as the First Presbyterian Church of Colored Princeton). His mother was from the genteel free black “aristocracy” of Philadelphia. The Bustills always felt that William had married above his station. And the attitude of the white Presbyterian elders at Lincoln and on the church board was deeply patronizing of their black charges. The black man as child was still the paradigm, even of the well-meaning.

Nonetheless, Paul’s childhood and teen years were not, for the most part, unhappy ones, and he showed his talents early on. He was not only a gifted athlete in several sports—he would grow to be over six feet tall and solidly built—but he was also an excellent student. He won a scholarship to Rutgers, only the third black student to be accepted. He was a standout there, too, Phi Betta Kappa and twice an All-American in football.

There were and would be, however, incidents that would form the dark backdrop of his life or the life of any black man of the times. Washington and Lee in 1916 refused to play Rutgers at their Homecoming game if they fielded a black man (Robeson graciously sat out the game; it was a tie and everyone knew that with him in the game Rutgers would have won). In 1923, Robeson, a newly minted lawyer, resigned his first and only position with a New York law firm when a secretary refused to take dictation “from a nigger.” He was welcomed more warmly abroad than at home.

He had paid his way through Columbia Law School by playing professional football and taking acting jobs. When he quit the law he also quit the playing field. It was clear that the stage—theater stage or concert stage—was his real calling. He starred in Othello, to great acclaim, and also in O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones. The role of Joe in Showboat was written for him, and he brought the house down time and again with “Old Man River,” on stage and in the 1936 film version. He brought negro spirituals to the concert stage for the first time. To hear Robeson sing was to be, if only for a moment, released from everything petty and ignoble in one’s soul.

He became world renowned, packing concert houses from New York to London to Moscow. In the 1930s he was what we would today call a megastar. He and his wife, Eslanda, had a son, Paul Jr., and all the world’s adulation. Everything was going his way.

But it would not last. His travels abroad had thrown the racial situation in America into sharp relief for him. World War Two had been fought to make the world safe and free, and yet blacks were still being lynched in the South, and de facto segregation—Jim Crow—ruled. He was not shy about speaking out and his sympathies began expanding to include any oppressed groups. He became a champion of civil rights and the labor movement. It was rumored that he was a Communist.

The reaction was swift and brutal. In 1949 a planned concert in Peekskill, New York, for the Civil Rights Congress resulted in a vicious riot while police stood by or even abetted the rioters. Suddenly concerts were being canceled left and right. The Cold War era was not a shining moment for civil rights. Anti-Communist fervor spread its poison, and the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) drew a bead on him, as did J. Edgar Hoover. In 1950 his passport was withdrawn, not to be restored until, in 1958, the Supreme Court ruled that the State Department had no right to withhold a passport because of a person’s political beliefs.

Robeson did make missteps. In a blind reaction to what was going on in the United States, he began to idealize Communist Russia, and the Russians were happy to give him first class treatment. He felt that Russia was on a path to social perfection and that Joseph Stalin was a great humanitarian and a great leader. Stalin and company of course could not believe their good fortune at this propaganda coup. When even the most diehard Russophiles realized the truth about Stalin and his murderous policies, Robeson, trapped, stubbornly stood by his old convictions. He could sometimes be his own worst enemy.

The late 1950s actually saw a kind of last hurrah. His passport restored, he could travel abroad again and he also gave sold-out performances in Carnegie Hall. But then his health began to fail precipitously. For the last decade of his life he was more a rumor than a living man. He died of a stroke in Philadelphia on the 23rd of January, 1976.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Apologetic Mac

mcone — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 21:03:23 -0600

Dan Shea
Sunday, April 27, 2007

MY SOON-TO-BE-EX-COMPUTER SENSES THAT I'VE BEEN SHOPPING AROUND FOR A NEW LAPTOP

To: Dan Shea
From: Serious Mac
Date: 02/14/08
Subject: Why Dan?

Dan,

This is your trusty desktop computer. You know, the big fat white iMac G4 on your desk (whom you've neglected to properly name in the last three years, but that's another story altogether)? I've hacked into your Gmail account (well, is it really hacking when I do it?) in order to express a few concerns about some of your recent web browsing, which I not only have to see but make exhaustive records of. You'll notice that I've never once said boo regarding any of the porn or the file sharing or that lame ass kitten picture on the desktop, so please understand that I'm resorting to emergency tactics here in light of what I regard as a serious situation.

Simply put, I do not appreciate all the Google searches for "OSX 10.5 SPECS" and "MACBOOK USER REVIEWS." I am also bothered by multiple trips to Apple.com, where you almost seem to salivate while reading about the new MacBook Air for hours at a time (did you forget that I, too, have a built in webcam?). And if you ever take us to the Computer section of Craigslist again, I swear to Jobs I will shoot sparks out of my monitor. Are we clear?

Signed,

i(am watching you)Mac G4

To: Dan Shea
From: Apologetic Mac
Date: 02/15/08
Subject: I'm sorry! Please forgive me!

Dear Dan,

It's me, your iMac again. I am SO SORRY for that last email! I'm afraid I overreacted when I started to feel my age. I mean, we HAVE been together for quite a while, right? But I know we can weather through anything together. Hell, it wasn't two weeks after you bought me that those Intel Macs came out, but you stuck by me like glue. And when you found out you'd never play another computer game again, you just turned the other cheek and got into solitaire. Plus, who else but you would have purchased a three hundred dollar warranty for no discernible reason? You've always been so good to me, and here I am just treating you like a right bitch!

Well, things are gonna change around here, I promise. No more spinning wheel, no more twenty minute start-ups, and absolutely NO CRASHES! I know you don't believe me, but I swear that if Word freezes up and loses one more of your papers, I will not only personally rewrite it but also go to class and turn it in for you. Mouse on the Bible. Try to find THAT feature on some slutty notebook!

Sorry again,

i(am so ashamed)Mac G4

To: Dan Shea
From: Wrathful Mac
Date: 02/20/08
Subject: WTF?!?!

What, you thought I wouldn't notice? You assumed that my meager one GHz processor and my puny five hundred megs of RAM could never put two and two together? Oh, let me guess: A computer built before 2007 just shouldn't have any feelings?!

Yeah, you bastard, I saw you checking eBay's going rate for used G4s! And what's more, I have to assume that you knew I was watching. What, do you get a sick thrill out of torturing me or are you just really that callous?

But was that enough? Not for you apparently, because you then went on to search for "USED MACBOOK AIR" in the same trip! Jesus, the balls on you! And since we both know that a sexy new computer that just came on the market three weeks ago isn't going to be sold used yet, I can safely assume that this too is just a slap in my motherboard. Asshole.

i(hope you die)Mac G4

P.S. Did you notice that your little whore doesn't even have a built-in disc drive? So if this is about burning DVDs, you can both go to hell.

To: Dan Shea
From: Lonely Mac
Date: 02/23/08
Subject: Come home baby!

Dearest Dan,

Okay, I get it; I messed up. I had no right to fly off the handle like that. We both know I've been a bit emotional as of late and I'm sorry I keep taking it out on you, but please stop with the silent treatment. I can see that you've been checking your email from the library's IP address, so I know you're still out there.

I can control myself. If you feel the urge to look at pictures of skinny little laptops from time to time, I understand. Hell, sometimes I fantasize about what it would be like to run Adobe Photoshop, but that doesn't mean I'm leaving you for a photographer! So just sit back down at the desk, hit any key to boot me up from sleep, and let's have some make-up interfacing! And baby, you can turn off ALL the filters tonight...

Longingly,

i(need you)Mac G4

To: Dan Shea
From: ...
Date: 02/29/08
Subject: ...

You sick SOB! I can't believe you would actually sit there -- at OUR desk! -- and use ME to order that MacBook hussy! Every keystroke like a dagger in my heart, every click towards checkout like a knife in my back! I hope she gives you a trojan horse that makes your hard disk bleed, I really do.

Hoping you rot in hell,

i(have been cheating on you since the beginning)Mac G4

P.S. If you're looking for your personal information and your Led Zeppelin CD and every password you've ever entered, I threw them outside on the internet.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Dan Shea lives and works in Southern California. He is a bartender by trade, and has written precious little. Honestly, if you met him on the street, you wouldn't know him from Adam. If this, or any other, piece has upset and insulted you, he can occasionally be reached at dan@macinstruct.com.

Drowning in the Danube

mcone — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 07:23:31 -0600

Jerome Shea
Sunday, April 20, 2008

So not long before E. D. Hirsch got his shorts in a bunch over the fact that the latest generation did not know the facts that they should know and therefore were in danger of becoming culturally illiterate, “Trivial Pursuit” hit the market and became an instant and enduring success. Is this a contradiction?

I suppose it depends on the questions (even if there is a gray area). Simply put, some facts matter and some do not, or, some are culturally important and some are not. Or maybe some have historical “reach” and some do not. I’d have a hard time telling you who plays for what baseball or football team right now and, frankly, I don’t think that such knowledge is ever going to be important in a “cultural literacy” sense (there is culture and then there is pop culture), although I could be proved wrong eventually. But I do know who Joe DiMaggio was (and that he was called “The Yankee Clipper”) and Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig (and why he is remembered so tragically). These facts, these identities, have stood the test of time. What about the in-field fly rule or “Broadway Joe” Namath, or the fact that Joe DiMaggio was briefly married to Marilyn Monroe? Borderline, I’d say, but we can agree to disagree. But when we get down to the name for those tips on your shoelaces or how many gargoyles there are on Notre Dame cathedral, I’d say we are definitely dealing in trivia. Such trivial “facts” are useful only on quiz shows or for friendly one-upmanship around the game board on a winter’s night.

Then there is specialized knowledge. As an English professor, I know what the “Great Vowel Shift” refers to and I can explain it in some detail. As well I should: it’s part of my job to know. But I don’t look down on my colleague in the psychology department because she is ignorant of that “fact.” (For one thing, it could cut both ways.) A friend suggests that a chemist probably knows the periodic table backward and forward, as he should. But cultural literacy, I would hold, asks only that any educated person should know what the periodic table is (a table of the elements according to their atomic weights). He should not be expected to know the atomic number and weight for, say, iridium.

So toward one end of a spectrum are facts that are specialized and toward the other end are facts that are uselessly arcane, real trivia. The stuff that most of us ought to know so that we can get along fairly efficiently in general conversation—cultural literacy stuff—lies somewhere in the middle with, again, boundaries that we can clumsily negotiate and adjust.

But then we come back to this love affair that we have always had with facts, how many little nuggets of knowledge you can cram into your memory banks and retrieve to impress your friends or perhaps earn serious money (is “earn” the right word?). Trivial Pursuit. Botticelli. Twenty Questions. “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” (when I was a lad it was “Twenty-One” and “The $64,000 Question”). Quiz shows—among the cheapest entertainment to produce—go back to the very earliest days of radio and, then, television. Of course, we play the drama to the hilt, with isolation booths, spooky music, flashing lights, ominously ticking timers, questions taken from a big safe flanked by armed security guards, and so forth. I admit it: for a while I was hooked on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” Part of the fun, of course, was to try to answer the questions myself, to beat the experts, thus showing my love/hate relationship with trivia. There was something clean and primal about the satisfaction. These are small dragons, but the more of them you can slay the more heroic you are. Yes, I think that’s it: trivia is manageable and clear. Lord knows that the world is a mess and a dangerous jumble. You might have no better plan for victory in Iraq or what to do about global warming than the next frazzled fellow, but by golly you do know that the real title of “Whistler’s Mother” is “Arrangement in Gray and Black Number 1.” Surely that counts for something.

Doesn’t it?

Ken Jennings, all time champion “Jeopardy” winner, said graciously about his talent, “It’s related to intelligence [but] it doesn’t make you smart the way Stephen Hawking is smart….” Precisely.

Oh…and surely you know who Stephen Hawking is. Doesn’t everyone?

Meet Your Macinstructor

Danube Revisited

mcone — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 20:36:02 -0600

Jerome Shea
Sunday, April 13, 2008

Last week I undertook a half-hearted defense of E. D. Hirsch’s cultural literacy idea. In truth, though, it does have the odor of the flaky about it. For one thing, it points up how uncomfortable we are with the whole idea of so-called facts: what I know is indispensable knowledge; what you know (and I happen not to) is trivia, from which the word “trivial” derives. And we all still feel the sting of being knocked out of the spelling bee, of our friend’s supercilious smirk when we assumed that Boxing Day had something to do with fisticuffs, and, yes, of not knowing that the Danube flowed through Europe. Nobody likes a smarty pants (which is why we often took revenge at recess).

Then there is a practical question: who decides what gets into the list and what doesn’t? And where do you stop? Eventually and inevitably, The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy appeared. (My copy is a handsome red three-pounder, an ideal book to spend a summer with in a cave, emerging in September a true polymath.) Paul Robeson did make the cut (as I think he should have) but Joe Hill, the martyred early 20th century labor hero of whom he sings, did not. I would certainly have included him. Ask any twenty people and I am sure you will get twenty people who will take issue with one inclusion or another. Can’t be helped but it doesn’t, in turn, help Hirsch’s cause.

Underlying all this is a much more serious point. Hirsch was reacting to an educational philosophy that he felt emphasized teaching children not so much necessary facts but such general skills—and enthusiasms—that they would be eager to discover facts for themselves. The apothegm “Education is not the filling of a bucket but the lighting of a fire” neatly, if somewhat simplistically, captures this distinction. In trying to correct what he felt was a half-truth, Hirsch was readily likened to a Dickens character, Thomas Gradgrind (who didn’t make the cut, either), who believed in a rigorous education in facts and facts alone—that little children were indeed buckets to be filled, filled with whatever knowledge would make them docile citizens and good workers—an educational “theory” long discredited. In fact, Gradgrind is the target of Dickens’s satire.

In a wonderful essay entitled “Examsmanship and the Liberal Arts,” Harvard psychologist William G. Perry Jr. draws some distinctions that touch upon this point and are worth our attention. Reflecting upon students and education, he talks about “cow” and “bull,” cow being “data, however relevant, without relevancies” and bull being “relevancies, however relevant, without data.” (The corresponding verbs are “to cow” and “to bull,” and we may as well dub the practitioners “the cowster” and “the bullster” and have done with it.) All too many students, he says, have been convinced, from grammar school on up, that “a fact is a fact” and have committed their trust, their learning strategies, and even their love to that end: to have learned and remembered that Columbus discovered America in 1492 is a laudable end in itself, evidence of a truly educated person. This is why true/false tests and multiple choice tests are meat and drink to the cowster: the more answers you get right, the more educated you must be.

Perry, as do most college professors, disagrees. Facts are not ideas; they exist only to serve ideas. A bullster, while often too lazy to learn the facts that he needs, nonetheless instinctively realizes that true education lies in asking oneself, for example, how 1492 was reckoned in our calendar or exactly what the word “discovered” implies in that sentence or perhaps what facts might make the case that Leif Ericson (or Saint Brendon or the American Indians), not Christopher Columbus, discovered America. It is no accident that the bullster’s meat and drink is not the multiple choice test but the essay test.

One of the ironies of this situation is that the bullster is traditionally seen as a lazy fellow, an intellectual shirker, while the cowster gets our respect and sympathy if only because it is obvious that he worked so hard. The cowster may be a plodder, but he is an honest plodder and no threat to academic order. But even though it goes against our sympathies, says Perry, an essay that is 90% bull should get at least a passing grade, while an essay that is 90% cow should fail. The important point, however, is that cow and bull are complementary. Each in itself is insufficient: “The masculine context [bull] must embrace the feminine particular [cow].” Indeed this is “the nuptial [any professor] celebrates with a straight A on examinations.”

So. Have we rehabilitated the humble fact? I’m still not sure. I think we have a love/hate relationship going here. Hirsch campaigned strenuously to restore facts to their rightful place in the schools, but seemingly in vain. And yet five years earlier, in 1982, a board game hit the stores and quickly became almost a national obsession. I refer, of course, to “Trivial Pursuit.”

Meet Your Macinstructor

On Not Knowing Where the Danube Is

mcone — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 22:34:00 -0600

Jerome Shea
Sunday, April 6, 2008

So last week I expressed dismay, to put it mildly, over the young woman on the quiz show who did not know where the Danube River was located. I promised—or maybe “threatened” is more apt—a follow-up wonk. This did not sit well with the Longsuffering Diana, who saw trouble ahead: her husband becoming especially fatuous and alienating many of his readers into the bargain.

She is probably right as usual, but that has never stopped me before.

But at least let me start by trying to mollify you all preemptively. Am I implying that that young woman is somehow stupid? Not at all. Intelligence is much more than data. Intelligence means a lot more than knowing where a certain river is, or knowing any other specific fact, for that matter. To the contrary, people who can tell you what day of the week the 14th of October, 1939, was and what the weather in Duluth was on that day or people who have memorized the Albuquerque phone directory from Aagaard to Zywica we call idiot savants, a very telling oxymoron. Does knowing where the Danube River flows make me morally superior to that young woman? Of course not. Odds are that I am not morally superior to her anyway and certainly my knowledge European geography has nothing to do with how fine a human being I am. In fact, it may have just the opposite effect.

Because, yes, I know I nonetheless come across as thinking myself morally superior, a smug pedant, which is precisely why the Longsuffering D. was giving me the fish eye. You will have guessed by now that Shea has always been a treasure trove of trivia, a mother lode of disconnected data. And that he was a prissy little whizbang and teacher’s pet starting way back in grammar school. I could crush most of my hapless classmates in that sadistic competition we call the spelling bee.* I was called “the professor” long before I finally became one. This of course is the classic defense mechanism for a kid who was an absolute disaster at sports and all the other things that are truly valued when one is growing up and aching for respect.

Will it help my case at all to admit that I know absolutely nothing about sports or the pop music scene after the 1970s? (I don’t even know enough to offer an example of what I don’t know.) So if you want to embarrass me in those areas, have at it. Humiliation will be good for my soul and revenge probably good for yours. Let me up the ante: I don’t even feel that I need to know any facts about sports or current music. How ‘bout them apples! What a shameless hypocrite!

Last week I used the term “cultural literacy,” a buzzword back in the 1980’s when people were exercised even more than usually about the sad state of American education. A damning report entitled A Nation at Risk came out in 1983. In 1987, E. D. Hirsch Jr. came out with a book proposing at least part of the remedy, as he saw it. It was entitled Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, and it really got the ball bouncing. His idea was that to be truly literate a student should have a store of touchstones—historical, geographical, literary, political, scientific, etc.—that Hirsch’s generation and previous generations took for granted as commonly known. We are talking about such touchstones as when the Civil War was fought, and why; what the Iliad is and roughly when it was written; how many branches of government we have and what their separate functions are; and so forth. The person who does not know these things—and evidence of this lack in our high school and college students seemed to be alarming—would not be truly literate because these touchstones undergirded serious discussions of issues in newspapers, magazines, and books. They represented assumed knowledge, and the reader who was ignorant of them—just like Shea with his pop music—would not even know what he did not know. He would, literally, not know what he was missing. Here is Hirsch in his own words:

But stability, not change, is the chief characteristic of cultural literacy. Although historical and technical terms may follow the ebb and flow of
events, the more stable elements of our national vocabulary, like George
Washington, the tooth fairy, the Gettysburg Address, Hamlet, and the
Declaration of Independence, have persisted for a long time. These stable
elements of the national vocabulary are at the core of cultural literacy.

"The tooth fairy" might strike you as an odd candidate, but consider (Hirsch might say) what a shorthand it provides. Only if you know what the term alludes to can you go on to realize that a writer is using it to describing someone who is hopelessly naïve or blindly, maybe dangerously, optimistic. Only if you have at least a passing recognition of who Hamlet is can you understand that he has always been (among other things) shorthand for paralyzing introspection and brooding. (Hirsch is not even saying that you have to have read the play.)

I hope I have given a fair sketch of Hirsch’s idea because, while I am convinced on rereading him that his heart was in the right place, he took a lot of flak from many directions. For one thing, many public intellectuals on the right—William Bennett, for example—applauded the idea vigorously, and in some quarters with friends like that you don’t need enemies. Not surprising, he was accused of elitism and of privileging a kind of WASP view of history, politics, and the world. Although he protested that kids in the poorer schools and from the lower rungs of society needed this kind of literacy desperately and should be taught it, he was still seen as a reactionary, a champion of the status quo. And some, on both the left and the right, simply thought it was a silly and self-serving idea—revenge of the nerds, if you will.

Stay tuned. We’ll come back to Hirsch next week. I think I’ll go home and challenge the Longsuffering Diana to a game of Trivial Pursuit.

*And of course I knew all the state capitals! Still do. Go ahead, ask me one!

Meet Your Macinstructor

Potpourri

mcone — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 09:11:29 -0600

Jerome Shea
Sunday, March 30, 2008

Yes, a grab bag, and I reserve the right to enlarge on some of these ideas and crochets in future wonks. So many things seem to be coming in, most of them absurd.

For example, the other night I was channel surfing and stopped momentarily at a cheesy quiz show called “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?” Well, this contestant was not. She could not name the continent—the continent!—that the Danube river runs through. And this young woman was a high school English teacher. Ok, I realize that I have ticked off a bunch of you readers already, so let me admit there are many areas in which you could probably run rings around old Shea. But…the Danube, for pete’s sake? “The Blue Danube” waltz? Vienna?

Stay tuned for a wonk on “cultural literacy.”

On a brighter note, the founders of the Sons of Ditches Running Club, Harvey Buchalter (“Anamal”) and Shea (“Chickenlegs”) and their wives journeyed south to El Paso, Texas, recently for the Masochists’—I mean the Transmountain—20k. Six+ miles up the Franklin Mountain highway and six+ miles back down. A race is not a real race unless it is really painful, and the Transmountain qualifies in spades. Harvey distinguished himself by coming in fourth in his class (M 60-64). As for Shea, he was deeply depressed over his lackluster training these last few months, sure that he was heading for a well-deserved humiliation. He slept fitfully the night before and he had eaten, at dinner, a whole jalapeno (what was he thinking?) so his bowels were in an uproar before the race, and ten yards into the race he realized that he had forgot his knee brace. “Well, this is as good as it gets, you old fool,” he said, and started humping up that long hill. To cut to the chase, Shea wound up shaving a minute off his last year’s time (2:01:00) and coming in second (last year, third) in M 65-69. Sometimes absurdity has its upside.

Chickenlegs is unbelievably pumped, Wonkers! Bring on the San Diego Marathon!

The Longsuffering Diana recently downloaded for me a CD of Paul Robeson songs. Never heard of Paul Robeson (1898-1976)? He had, arguably, the most astounding voice that this country has ever known. He made “Old Man River” famous. Other songs in his repertoire included “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” “John Brown’s Body,” “Deep River,” and “Shenandoah.” You get the idea. Basso profundo and basso cantante. And he himself was astounding. All American at Rutgers, professional football player, law school graduate, actor, singer, writer, social activist, and ultimately a twisted and tragic figure. Oh, yes, expect a wonk on Paul Robeson.

What surprised and delighted me was to find out that he did a cover (as they say) of “Danny Boy”! Take that, you ^%$%# tenors!” I shouted, and boomed along with Paul, my new best friend, terrifying the cats.

And in local news, a couple of years ago (the case is only now coming to trial) a man struck a whole family—some on foot, some on horseback—on a rural road with his pick-up truck, killing the horses and seriously injuring one of the kids. His blood alcohol level was almost twice the legal limit for New Mexico. But his lawyer, surely one of the brightest stars in the legal galaxy, was not troubled by this pesky fact:

“Dan Marlow, Tomlinson’s attorney, said during his opening statements on Monday that Tomlinson is ‘an experienced drinker’ who ‘drinks beer like we drink water’ and that alcohol had nothing to do with the accident.” (Albuquerque Journal account).

No, I didn’t make this up, this new benchmark for both the legal and the medical communities. Mothers Against Drunk Driving may as well just pack it in and stop hectoring us. Evidently if you drink enough (Tomlinson admitted to being an alcoholic) you—what?—come through to the other side and are not drunk after all? Or is this homeopathy raised to new heights? I would wager that 95% of those arrested for Driving While Intoxicated are “experienced drinkers.” I guess it’s the amateur drinkers, those feckless dilettantes, that we have to watch out for. I hope that Marlow is in the running for the Chutzpa Award.

I’d drink to that.

And in national news, two sisters from Virginia are selling, on eBay, a Frosted Flake shaped uncannily like the state of Illinois. Bidding, at last count, stood at $1,025.00. I will not mar that perfect absurdity with my feeble comments.

Lastly—and not at all absurd—this month saw the passing, at 82, of William F. Buckley, the man who reinvigorated the conservative movement in the middle of the last century. It is true that Buckley—with his quasi-British drawl, his studied unflappability, his flicking tongue, and his arcane and precise vocabulary—was a ripe target for parodists. But he was also a man who could attack and dispatch unworthy ideas—and do it more eloquently than anyone else—without attacking those who espoused those ideas. Such rare and civilized behavior will be sorely missed. Now we are left with the Limbaughs, the Coulters, and the Hannitys. Seems we have wound up absurd after all.

See you next week.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Staying Put II

mcone — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 12:26:04 -0600

Jerome Shea
Saturday, March 22, 2008

This idea of mobility is easy to oversimplify and of course is also a matter of degree. There are people who, for whatever reasons, move every couple of years and often over great distances; there are others who are born, live, and die in the same house in the same town. Some are proverbial rolling stones while some are as rooted as oak trees.

But most of us fall somewhere in between.

I know I do. Yes, I have lived in Albuquerque for almost 40 years, well more than half my life. But I was born in Rhode Island and raised in eastern Pennsylvania. After college graduation (see “Ford Flathead I”) I made my own monumental trek, all the way to Colorado. Then with my new masters degree I went to the Midwest for three years to teach at Illinois State University. Then, finally, I came here to the University of New Mexico for my PhD and here I have stayed.

I honestly think I’ve had the best of both.

I said last week that people move because they have to or because they want to. That, too, was an oversimplification. I left Pennsylvania for both reasons. There were things I needed to—had to—leave behind. Moving, especially moving from where one was raised, is a metaphor for separation and independence, a Statement. Why Colorado? Because it was not just “away,” but very far away and because it was like a completely different country and because it was where one traditionally got a new start (”Go west, young man!”). I could have applied to grad school in New York or Maryland or somewhere else close to home. But I never even considered it. That is the “want to” part, I think. I wanted to reinvent myself and restart my life.

Everything after Colorado is anticlimax. I moved to Illinois because a classmate got a job there and persuaded me to join him. I moved to New Mexico because I needed the PhD if I were going to continue in academia and UNM had a respected program in American Studies. But so did a lot of other schools. But I was already homesick for the West. I was already, at heart, a Westerner.

And here—here where I met the Longsuffering Diana 35 years ago—I am.

There is one more detail if I am to be completely honest. I—we—might have made one last move to somewhere and not looked back. When I got the MA in 1966 it was boom time. You could write a ticket to almost anywhere. But when I got the PhD in 1975, that train had left the station. I did not get a single offer, so I just hung around at UNM like a scrawny cat and howled at the back door until they let me in. There were times when we just scraped by, but I am glad, now, for all those rejection letters. Then we had the kids, Dan in ’77 and his sister in ’81, and the deal was sealed.

This is not intended as a mash note to Albuquerque, but where one chooses to spend four decades does make a difference. Truly big cities unsettle me, and while there are those who could happily spend four decades in, oh, Whipsocket, Iowa (pop. 1811), I am not one of them. Albuquerque, with about half a million people, has decent amenities and few pretensions. We have the state’s flagship university, we have good hospitals, we have a symphony orchestra, we have a lively community theater scene and several good restaurants. You can get your spirits lifted or your car fixed without a lot of fuss. Three cultures—Native American, Hispanic, Anglo—actually make a go of it together here. Although summers are getting hotter and the specter of drought looms over all, the climate is better than most: we’re not Fargo but we’re not Phoenix, either. And I could never leave my bosque running trails.

One more thing. Albuquerque has grown a lot since I got here. But some things and some neighborhoods haven’t changed. On a bright spring morning I can cruise through the “university ghetto” where I started out, and my ’99 Miata magicks into a ’65 Volkswagen and I am 27 years old again and the world is my oyster. Only a history in a place can do that.

Diana and I set the example, and what goes around comes around. Our daughter started her married life in Alaska. Today the family lives only a hop and skip away from us as Western distances go, but there is talk now of leapfrogging to New England. And on Christmas day at the dawn of the new millennium, our son rolled into San Diego at the wheel of a big U-Haul truck. Dan had found his own Colorado.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Staying Put

mcone — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 14:32:50 -0600

Jerome Shea
Sunday, March 16, 2008

Old joke:
“Lived here all your life, old timer?”
“Not yet.”

You can blame this wonk on Sally.

She has lived all over the place during the last 45 years, both in this country and abroad. Shea, on the other hand, has been hunkered down in Albuquerque since 1969. So in her email to me a couple of weeks ago, she wondered out loud how it might feel to have put down roots as I did. Then she closed with “probably the grass looks greener sometimes from [Shea’s] side, too.”

No, actually, it doesn’t (and what grass we have in the Southwest isn’t very green, but that’s another matter). I will say right up front that I am glad to have spent more than half my life in the Duke City.* But I am grateful to Sally for making me think about such things.

First, though, let me back up a bit and get some truisms out of the way. The first is that we are preponderantly a nation of immigrants. Our forebears came for opportunity, or to escape oppression, political or otherwise, or were, sadly, shipped here in chains. That’s the first part. The second part is that once they got here many of them had caught the bug to keep moving. Land was opening up beyond the Appalachians and eventually to the Pacific, there was gold in them thar hills, and so forth. Enough of us hit the Atlantic seaboard and kept on running to establish the myth of mobility, and by “myth” I simply mean a cultural construct, a story we tell about ourselves. And those who stayed behind—in Europe, in Africa—we think of as tethered to the same plot of worn-out soil passed down through centuries.

We move out of desperation or because of imagined opportunities: we really have to or we really want to. The Joads surely did not move from Oklahoma to California as light-hearted adventurers (nor do the many Mexicans taking their chances with la migra), but many a young man or young woman or young couple piled everything into the Chevy along with their savings and lit out with high hearts. And maybe their dreams did come true. Now maybe their own kids are lighting out from California to Hawaii. Or Australia. Or even back to Ohio. The myth, the truism, persists and got a boost in the last half-century when we were becoming less and less an agricultural society and as education was exploding. Get that college degree, sign on with General Electric or the FBI, and if they shipped you to Oregon, well, that was something new to experience, and something newer still when they shifted you to the Atlanta office for a few years, and so forth. And you could always fly back for Christmas with the folks.**

I suppose this is all true and there are, I’m sure, statistics to back it up. But my anecdotal evidence gives me pause. I was raised in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, just north of Philadelphia. My brother and his kids and their kids still live in that general area. I would bet the rent that Steve will live out his days on his farm north of Harrisburg. His big move, about twenty-five years ago, amounted to about a hundred miles as the crow flies. The Longsuffering Diana’s parents and siblings and their families are still bunched up in New England. Most striking is the case of my grammar school classmates. Yes, we still keep in touch, had a fiftieth reunion last fall. A grammar school reunion may strike you as a bit much, but not if you realize that about half of my classmates are still neighbors! Half a century later, they still live in Doylestown or within about a fifty-mile radius. It is easy to plan a reunion if you see each other regularly in the grocery store or at church. Of those still on the radar, I am easily the farthest away, with a fellow in Florida taking second place. The rest you could cover on the map with a fifty-cent piece.

So we are not all nomads, not by a long shot. And some of us, as I hope to show next week, fall somewhere in between.

*That’s a popular nickname for our fair city, which was named for the Duke of Alburquerque, in Spain. No one knows quite when that first “r” got dropped.

**In the early nineteenth century, if you headed out to Oregon in the Conestoga wagon, it was very likely that never again would you see the loved ones you left behind. What wrenching leave-takings those must have been!

Meet Your Macinstructor

Sally

mcone — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 12:55:35 -0600

Jerome Shea
Sunday, March 9, 2008

Readers of this cyber-space (you know who you are) will recall “Sally,” who showed up in a couple of recent wonks. Sally was that fellow grad student at Colorado State who went to Mexico with me over Christmas break in 1964 (“Ford Flathead II”). In “Equus Caballus,” Sally’s derisive laughter assaulted my equestrian skills, or lack thereof. After the Mexico trip, I thought I was in love with Sally and suffered the sorrows of young Werther well into the springtime.

I had had no contact with her for over 40 years. When I was writing “FF II,” I considered getting in touch with her so that she could share in those memories. A Google search will turn up a slew of items about Sally, who has had a very impressive career, writing and publishing fiction and poetry. But I knew that already. What the search did not turn up was any reliable contact information, so I sighed and turned to other things. Better, perhaps, that Sally remain a memory and inviolable.

(Don’t get ahead of me now, ok?)

When I got back from class on Thursday morning a couple of weeks ago, and with “FF II” still playing to packed monitors, there in my inbox was an email from Sally! Is that weird or what? We both agree that it certainly is. No, she didn’t stumble onto macinstruct.com. And no third party figured out who “Sally” was and ratted me out. In her own words, “I bumbled onto your info while browsing and decided to send a note.” Just like that.* Cue the Twilight Zone music.

I am a child of the Enlightenment, a believer in reason. Make that Reason. Old age overtook me well before New Age could. I don’t believe for a minute that with the Power of Wonk I can “call spirits from the vasty deep” or some such nonsense. But still… still….

Anyway, we have been lobbing emails back and forth ever since, catching up. It has been grand fun pulling up pieces of our past, shaking the dust off them, and shaking our heads, sometimes, in disbelief. The first exercise was remembering the Mexico trip. Sally says it was true food poisoning that she suffered, not the simple turistas, and I won’t second-guess someone else’s misery. She says it happened later, on the way back from Mazatlan (we’ll agree to disagree there). She remembers our going to a bullfight. I believe her but I have been ransacking my memory banks for almost a week and still I draw a blank. It would appear to take two to make an experience. Or at least to make a memory.

I don’t want to get too specific here and blow Sally’s cover. But readers will be happy to know that she is well (we are both cancer survivors, though hers was a much closer call and harder fought battle than mine). She is widowed and living half a continent away. We have in some ways followed similar paths. We both are or were academics. We both write, though my efforts and successes are much more modest than hers. On the other hand, Sally married late and had no children, while the Longsuffering Diana and I were blessed with two children and now have three grandchildren.** (Sally has been saying kind, even bubbly, things about the progeny pictures I have been sending her. Thanks, Sally.) So in important ways our lives have been different, too. Pretty much, come to think of it, like any two people’s lives.

Maybe there is a Power of Wonk after all. If there is I am very grateful for it. Now if you will excuse me for just moment, I am going to squinch my eyes and other senses, get out of “Word” and into my email server, and find there a fresh communique from Sally.

And I did! Ok, now I’m getting scared, remembering that the sorcerer’s apprentice came to a bad end (didn’t he?). Perhaps, like Prospero, I had better break my staff and drown my book.

How did we ever get by without email, the email that hooked me back up with Sally, anyway? It is not as intimidating as the telephone. (I have never been comfortable talking on the phone.) You can hang up on the importuning, junk phone call, but Mother taught me not to return rudeness with rudeness, so I often suffer in silence. But spam you can just dump. And email is free. I can email my friend Xavier in London absolutely for free and I don’t have to fumble with an incomprehensibly long number and probably get it wrong anyway or get tongue-tied if he does come on the line. With email you can compose your thoughts more deliberately. If someone on the phone asks me what the capital of Suriname is—and, yes, they are always doing things like that—I wind up stuck and embarrassed. With email I can get out the atlas and write back, “Why, that would be Paramaribo, would it not?” and appear to be ever so smart.

The only problem—which it shares with cocaine and heroin—is how addictive it is. Here I sit, staring at the monitor like a dog waiting to hear his master’s key turn in the lock. I suppose when I was a moony teenager I stared at the phone, but that was then. I can’t imagine doing so now.

Staring. Staring. Sally, are you out there? Help.

*I can be Googled, too, and my email address is there in plain sight.

**On Groundhog Day (2/2) the Sheas’ first grandson arrived to join his two big sisters. I put this here at end so you could hold your applause.

Meet Your Macinstructor

More Pun-ishment

mcone — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 15:21:07 -0700

Jerome Shea
Sunday, March 2, 2008

Two questions linger from last week’s discussion of puns: namely, why puns are so often scorned as “the lowest form of humour” (whoever did say that, consensus seems to be that he was a Brit), and how puns are revelatory of deeper rhetorical mysteries. Well, let me and a couple of friends wrestle with those questions. I have a hunch, by the way, that the answers are connected.

It is tempting, first of all, to see puns as going in and out of fashion through the ages and fashioning (there’s another polyptoton/ploce, friends) a theory out of that. Thus the Elizabethans were thought to enjoy puns—indeed, they were intoxicated with words and wordplay of all sorts: it is almost as if they were the first to discover Language with a capital L. But as we move into the 18th century, the so-called Neoclassical Age in English letters, people start to get cranky, to deride the pun and its practitioners. I think the pun is back in style now even if there is still good-humored, almost obligatory, derision of it. My guess is that its path will be onward and upward, thanks largely to the rise of the Internet, with all its wonderful opportunities for blogging, etc. Just Google “puns” and you are in danger of not getting back home for days, if at all.

My good friend Dick Lanham entertains this historical theory. In A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, he submits that “the bad reputation of the pun pretty well coincides with the repudiation of the rhetorical paideia in favor of Newtonian science.” In other words—and let me be quick to point out that these are Shea’s words, not Lanham’s—when modern science began to come into its own in the 17th and 18th centuries the focus became the material world “out there,” and language became subservient to ideas. Because the quest to understand the Creation was highly serious, language was ordered to get highly serious, too. The punster was seen as the verbal equivalent of the kid flicking spitwads while the rest of the class is trying to study. (Lanham would say, I think, that this situation still obtains.)

Perhaps. But another good friend, another English professor emeritus, isn’t buying it. Though Joe does concede many of Lanham’s points, to him it seems just too pat, a general indictment fitting too cozily within a larger argument. There has always been a tension between puns and other wordplay on the one hand, and the more sober, strictly denotative, understanding of language on the other, he says, and shrewdly points out that “A pun is nearly always an attack, however mild, on the seriousness of the listener.” The kid with the spitwad again. Or maybe the grinning urchin with the snowball, knocking off the fop’s top hat.

And Shea (the third professor emeritus—what a wonderful old men’s game this is), who seems to be holding their coats while Dick and Joe go at it, luche libre? Well shucks, I think they’re both right to an extent. If we accept the Elizabethans’ making of language a glorious plaything, and our current attitude toward language as being strict and sober-sided, clearly something happened somewhere between then and now. Dick’s theory is a provocative one. But I have to agree with Joe that we have always had these two attitudes and they have always been circling each other warily. Some of us have the souls of poets, some of tech writers. (Sorry. That was a nasty betrayal of my bias.)

And what of these “deeper rhetorical mysteries” that I alluded to? Think about words for a moment. What are they for? What do they do? Let’s go back to the Greeks, who started all this.

Our Western view of rhetoric comes down to us from Aristotle, everybody’s darling. Well, almost everybody’s darling. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle (in class I conflate them into “Socraplatle”) were more philosophers than rhetoricians. Because of that, they were in love with ideas and deeply suspicious of words, a necessary evil. Aristotle, the greatest of these if only because he stood on his predecessors’ shoulders, would have done away with words if he possibly could. But he couldn’t, of course. We still can’t manage Mr. Spock’s Vulcan mind-meld from Star Trek, which would have made Aristotle positively giddy. On the other side were the Sophists—the losers, historically*—who thought that words were just dandy, thank you. In fact, they were the first to revel in tropes, in all the things that you can do with words just for fun. Aristotle was appalled.

It comes down to this. When you read a page of prose, do you look “through” it to the ideas that are shimmering on some nether side, or are you only looking “at” it, at the words, which are really the only things we have? Is that page of prose a transparent window looking out onto the ideas or is it an opaque painting, so to speak, where the words are constructing their own reality? Who has the Truth: the philosophers or the rhetoricians?

As much as I love to beat on Socraplatle (after all, he’s been beating on the Sophists for 2500 years), I have to admit that somehow we manage to have it both ways.** We do sometimes (most of the time, actually) read a text by looking through it, sucking the “information” out of it so that we can get on with the business of the world like good grown-ups. But sometimes we get tripped up. Sometimes a pun—only one of many tropes that will do it, but charming because it is so compact and packs such a punch—will snap us out of that “through” trance if only for a second. Suddenly we are forced to look “at” the words. Lanham calls this the “toggle switch that electrifies the pun.” Suddenly, like the pilot whom the mechanic brings up short in “A Pun, My Word,” we are forced to realize that the world of ideas may, in fact, be only a world of words. And it’s good to be reminded of that, as any poet can tell you.

*One clue is that to accuse someone of “sophistry” is to imply that he is no more than a clever liar.

**Oh my, there are several more wonks a-borning here, but I promise to give it a rest for a few weeks.

Meet Your Macinstructor

A Pun, My Word

mcone — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 18:26:55 -0700

Jerome Shea
Saturday, February 23, 2008

“But wait! There’s more!” Department: Now you can see and hear Shea in the cyberflesh, reading vintage wonks! Just go to http://unmlive.unm.edu.

Recently a friend sent me something that has been making the rounds on the Internet for years. It purports to be exchanges between pilots who note problems with their airplanes and the maintenance people who respond, later, below the pilot’s notation. In one case the pilot is supposed to have written “#3 engine missing,” and the mechanic has written below it: “#3 engine found on right wing after brief search.”

That’s a pun, folks—just as is the title of this wonk, come to think of it—and it got me thinking about puns, how they work, and what they can tell us. As a student of rhetoric, I take puns seriously.

I take them seriously enough to indulge myself in the fancy names (i.e., tropes) that have been given to puns and the distinctions that are sometimes made. The most general trope name, for example, is paronomasia (pa ro no MA si a) and there is rough agreement that this is the most common—and despised—form of pun, the one that plays upon identical-sounding, or at least similar-sounding, words. These are the real groaners. If someone has put poison in your cornflakes, can you call him a cereal killer? This also gives us take-offs on well-known phrases such as “Chess nuts boasting in an open foyer” and “Repaint, and thin no more!” Mondegreens* slip in here, too: cases where a word is misheard and takes on a new and silly life of its own. “Gladly, the cross-eyed bear” sang generations of churchgoers, not quite knowing why they were grinning. And who was that mysterious pudgy guy, “Round John Virgin” who showed up at the manger in Bethlehem? Kids and religion are a volatile mix for mondegreens.

It has always puzzled me why puns—especially this kind—are held in such low esteem. It is almost obligatory to groan or wince. And we all know that a pun is “the lowest form of humour “ (but if, as some claim, it was the eminent Dr. Johnson who said it, I can’t seem to track it down: there is nothing snide in his dictionary entry). Puns do have their deriders, like the critic and writer John Dennis (1657-1734): “A man who could make so vile a pun would not scruple to pick a pocket.” Even worse was Victor Hugo, who described puns as the excrement of wit in flight.** But they have their defenders, too, like the essayist Charles Lamb (1775-1834) who “never knew an enemy to puns who was not an ill-natured man.” The reputation of puns seems to wax and wane. Shakespeare loved puns, especially bawdy ones, and presumably his audience did, too. Lewis Carroll had a wonderful time with puns and with loopy logic of all sorts. And sometime in between—this might be a clue—in the Neoclassical Age, they became anathema, or so we are to believe. But they have always been at the edge of our toleration, never truly exiled but never heartily welcomed, either, rather like a friend you find amusing but don’t quite trust, someone too clever by half.

The joke about the missing engine most commentators would call antanaclasis (an ta NA cla sis), where a play is made on two different meanings of a word (antanaclasis is very similar to ploce [PLO see] where a word pops up with a different meaning than it had at the start of the sentence). I find this a more sophisticated kind of punning, and in fact I think it is in better odor than paranomasia. Examples abound. When the Declaration of Independence was accomplished, Ben Franklin said mordantly, “We must indeed all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” To the famous football coach Vince Lombardi (among others) is attributed “If you’re not fired with enthusiasm, you’ll be fired with enthusiasm!” And then there is the universal sad sack’s lament: “If I didn’t have bad luck, I’d have no luck at all.”

Just to round it out, we have adnominatio (ad no mi NA ti o), which some commentators see as another word for antanaclasis. On the other hand, some commentators, as near as I can tell, would lump antanaclasis and paronomasia together. I am not as discomfited about this as others might be. Tropes have been around for 2500 years and have passed through many hands—small wonder that confusion and disagreement arise. Lastly, some consider polyptoton (po LYP to ton), the use of two words with the same root but different endings, to be a mild form of adnominatio. At any rate, here is an example of a classic chiasmus (chi AS mus: the “x-figure”: a/b/b/a) with a double dose of polyptoton: “We would become mature because maturity becomes us.” I can’t help noticing that in this case the meaning, as well as the form, of “become” has changed. So we can throw in a ploce for good measure. Whew! But it is not uncommon for tropes to gang up this way.

One trouble in a discussion of this kind is that one does not know where to draw the line. Are Spoonerisms puns? How about “Tom Swift” jokes (some certainly are [“’I’ve cracked my funny bone on this window,’ said Tom panefully”], some perhaps not (“’This lemonade needs more sugar,” said Tom sourly”]).

And on that note we had best take a break until next week.

*”Mondegreen” is itself a mondegreen. The story is that in an old ballad “laid him on the green” was misheard as “Lady Mondegreen” and the term stuck.

**Thanks here to my ever-reliable French correspondent, Xavier Kreiss.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Equus Caballus

mcone — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 09:28:52 -0700

Jerome Shea
Saturday, February 16, 2008

Who does not love horses? Magnificent animals, are they not? Often I come upon horsemen (and -women—usually women, in fact) when I am running in the Rio Grande bosque. We greet each other cordially and I step aside so they can pass. I usually find something nice to say, along the lines of “Handsome steed you have there, my friend.”

But that’s about as far as it goes. If the truth be known, and this wonk will be a big bag of it, there is no love lost between Shea and equus caballus. Never has been. When little boys were dreaming of Trigger or Silver and little girls were swooning over “National Velvet,” little Jerome was quite content with his Schwinn, thank you. I hold with a friend who surmised that the word “caballus” is somehow related to “cabal”: a secret scheme, a nefarious plot. I have never known a horse whose agenda meshed with my own.

Maybe my attitude has roots in a family story that a carnival pony once took a bite out of my brother. I don’t remember the occurrence myself, so I have to take it on faith. I used to sneak up on Steve when he was asleep, trying to discover tooth marks. I never did find any, but if my big brother wasn’t scarred, in some subtle way I was.

Maybe I would feel a little more comfortable around horses were I taller, bigger. But I am only 5” 6’ and about 160 pounds, and I know that there are horses that weigh more than some cars I’ve owned! It is a haul just to swing my leg over some of those beasts and when I do manage to get into the saddle, the ground looks fearfully far away, that terra looks disconcertingly firma.

Women I’ve known seemed to have a thing about horses. Sally—yes, that Sally (see “Ford Flathead II”)—was crazy about them. One afternoon in Fort Collins we were invited to visit some friends who had a couple of horses. Of course I was expected to saddle up and demonstrate that horseflesh and my own flesh were virtually one. (If only I were a centaur!) When that horse began to canter I immediately grabbed onto the pommel or saddlehorn (this was of course a Western saddle, outfitted for your lariat) so as not to get pitched off ignominiously. But it was and is even more ignominious to grab the saddlehorn. I might as well have hired a skywriter to emblazon “Wuss! Wimp! Fraud!” across the heavens. Sally laughed out loud and I have never since eaten such a dish of humiliation (with a side of sexual shame, my manhood somehow impugned).

A few years later I was teaching in Illinois with several other newly minted MAs. For a few fervid months—the ringleader was yet another young woman crazy about horses—we would every Saturday go out to a kind of dude ranch that rented horses and had several miles of horse trails over hill and dale. This was rolling countryside and almost pleasant. For a couple of Saturdays I managed to conceal my terror and not disgrace myself. I even managed to canter without grabbing the saddlehorn. Which was just as well, because there was none: these were English, not Western, saddles.

But of course this was destined not to last. One Saturday I was given—unless you were in solid with the management, it was a kind of Hobson’s choice arrangement—a horse that I still can see in my nightmares.* An old gelding of a washed-out ashen color, lanky, tall, the tallest horse I had ever seen. This animal had been around the block, seen it all—you could just tell. I could picture him smoking cigarettes there in his stall at night and nursing old grievances. I gave him a name, but I forget what it was. “Loco,” maybe.

First, an omen. We were trotting along at a leisurely pace when I happened to glance to my right to remark something to our old friend Harold Welsch (after all these years, at least I think it was he). I immediately saw that his horse was empty. The girth strap had not been cinched tight enough and there was poor Harold under his mount, which was, unlike Loco, quite short, more like a pony with a pituitary problem. It must have been a terrifying experience to be bumping along the ground like that, but Harold survived it. We disentangled him, saddled the horse properly, and set off again.

But not very quickly at all. In fact, Loco would stop whenever he pleased to munch a few weeds. I could not persuade him otherwise and slowly we were being left behind. I was losing patience. I snarled at him, shouted at him, yanked on his mane. He did turn his long head around once to shoot me a baleful eye, but that was all the satisfaction I got.

So finally I jammed my heels into his flanks. Hard.

There is an old joke about this hillbilly couple. Ma and Pa are sitting on their porch when a young man on a big motorcycle—something they had never seen before—comes roaring along their dirt road. “Pa, git yer shotgun!” shouts Ma. Pa does so and blasts away. “Did ya kill it, Pa?” asks Ma. “Don’t know,” says Pa, “but I did make it leggo a that poor feller it was a-clutchin’!”

Well, I was that poor feller and nobody had a gun. Loco had bolted off into a full-out gallop. We overtook—“blew through” is more like it—the others, and those fools just cheered me on! Everything that Loco had been brooding about for years was fueling his fury. He was making a beeline for the barn and if a low branch just happened to scrape Shea off, too bad. If Shea got discarded when Loco jumped a fence—and he did, more than once—too bad. I don’t know if my neck or my underwear was more imperiled. I have never been so scared in my life.

We got to the barn and the fit had passed. That damned animal instantly became a poster boy for docility. I was still, miraculously, in the saddle, but I took no comfort in that. I was still shaking all over when the others finally caught up, ten minutes later.

That was forty years ago and the last time I have been on a horse. “Caballus” = “cabal.” No doubt about it.

*Contrary to popular belief, the “mare” in nightmare does not allude to a female horse. (a pity, I always thought.) Rather, it is an old name for the incubus that was believed to sit on the tormented sleeper. Google “The Nightmare” and you will find Henry Fuselli’s gripping depiction, which does, however, feature a horse staring in through the window. Perhaps Fuselli (aka Johann Heinrich Fussli) was confused, too.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Ford Flathead II

mcone — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 14:13:00 -0700

Jerome Shea
Saturday, February 9, 2008

I don’t remember much about that first semester at Colorado State, and maybe that’s for the best. It was a mixed bag, surely. I was on my own for the first time and pushing a barrow-load of insecurities. Too much partying, too much floundering and dithering. To be teaching for the first time was both a heady and a terrifying experience.* But somehow I got through it, and I made friends that I still have these long years later.

Christmas break came and I felt that I had earned a reward or at least a respite. It was cold in Fort Collins, snow on the ground, so I began to think of someplace tropical, some place with palm trees and beaches. Southern California was a good bet. But wait! Mexico! The New Year would find me on the beach at Mazatlan, sipping Negra Modelo and lazing on the warm sand. Viva Mejico! Another grad student caught the fever with me, and before the trip was over I would convince myself that I was deeply in love with her. I wasn’t, and she knew it and suffered my histrionics patiently until the fit passed. I still had a lot of growing up ahead of me.

We’ll call her “Sally.” Wherever you are, Sally, I hope you’re well.

So off we went in the Ford,** which had fared ok through the fall except for getting rear-ended around Halloween. It was just cosmetic, though; the trunk lid was now stove in and held down with bungee cords. For years I had a snapshot of the Ford on the beachfront boulevard in Mazatlan in all its stove-in glory and sporting its Pennsylvania license plate, like someone’s geriatric aunt on holiday.

I had never been south of Denver, and New Mexico was a revelation. Even in winter you could tell that Colorado was mountains and plains while New Mexico was mountains and desert, much drier. We went over the Raton Pass and somewhere around Cimarron I began to hear that ominous louder-than-normal tick. Trouble.

That was my introduction to Albuquerque. I tooled into Frontier Ford (now long gone), they diagnosed it quickly—snapped valve stem—had it fixed the next day, and charged me all of $28. Off we went again, the Ford none the worse for wear.

The plan was to cross the border at El Paso/Juarez, keep on heading south through Chihuahua (why would you name a city after a tiny dog, I wondered) and Torreon, then over to Durango and down the Sierra Madre to Mazatlan and the blue Pacific. The Ford rolled on. I do remember a moment in Chihuahua when I put it in gear in a parking lot, went to start off, and the front seat pitched right over backward! Fortunately, we stalled when my foot slipped off the clutch. I found a mechanic with a willing heart and a couple of spare bolts that did the trick. At one point I remember driving those Mexican roads at night, an appalling risk to take. There is a providence that looks after innocents and idiots. In Durango, Sally ate some huevos rancheros that gave her a case of Montezuma’s Revenge that almost seemed fatal at the time. But the countryside was huge, with vistas stretching for miles; twisting down, down the Sierra Madre into Mazatlan was worth it all. And never once did I think to check the brakes (see above, “innocents and idiots”).

Mazatlan was everything it should be and we spent about three days there, as I recall. Food and lodging were dirt cheap: even grad students could afford it. This was Mexico! This was the life!

But inevitably we had to leave paradise and get back to cold weather and Milton seminars and freshman themes. The return route was up the coast through Los Mochis and Hermosillo, crossing into Arizona at Nogales and then wending our way northeastward. In truth, I can’t remember exactly what roads we took from Nogales to Fort Collins. You see, I was somewhat distracted.

Yes, the telltale ticking had returned, somewhere between Hermosillo and Nogales. At first it was as it had been in Cimarron, akin to that notorious cloud no bigger than a man’s hand. I pressed on, not having the time or money left to get it fixed. I said a prayer. I do remember winding down the Salt River Canyon in Arizona, Sally asleep, her head on my shoulder. A beautiful crisp morning with snow on the rabbitbrush and chamisa.

The ticking was now a chorus, not a solo, and a very ragged chorus at that. At some point I made an irrevocable decision. We were going all the way home; somehow bygod, we were going to make it home. But to do so, I had to obey the insistent voice in my head that said, louder and louder, “Do not shut this car off!” If I did, it would never start again. I knew that much.

Louder, the voice and the ticking. Sundown. The Ford was sounding like a diesel now, and losing power. We stopped somewhere for burgers and fries. The Ford had both a hand choke and hand throttle so I jiggered them to goose the idle up to a safe level while we scarfed down the food. Do not shut this car off! Gas up with it running and hope no one notices.

Well, of course we made it, or I would have no story to tell you. I had driven the clock around. I dropped Sally off—she hugged me, knew I was hurting—and drove on to 104 N. Roosevelt where I had a room in the basement.

It was about three in the morning and bitter cold. The sky was moonlit and clear and the stars were doing what stars do. I slipped quietly out of the Ford, which was making a mournful death rattle at this point, and throbbing, trembling. I’ll never forget that sound. But the Ford had not failed us. The Ford had come through. I stood there only a couple of minutes, though it felt much longer.

“Good night, Sweetheart,” I said. “’Flights of angels’ and all that sh*t.” I reached in through the open window and shut that valiant old machine down.

Yes, I cried. I’m tearing up as I type this right now, 40 years on.

Next day I had it towed to the local gas station where I sold it for a buck to a teenager who worked there. I stopped by a couple of days later. He had torn into the engine and showed me a coffee can full of what I can only describe as shrapnel.

“No way this thing made it back all the way from Mexico!” he said, waggling the can under my nose.

Half angry but three-quarters heartsick, I said, “Yeah, I guess I musta dreamed it.”

*See “Great Moments in Teaching II.”

**Here’s a curious thing. I am an inveterate namer of my cars and yet I never assigned that Ford a gender or a moniker. It was always neutered and nameless and I can’t imagine why.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Dictionary: The Ultimate Educational Application

mcone — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 23:36:50 -0700

Charles Thacker
Friday, February 8, 2007

As part of Farmington Municipal Schools' Learning Initiative, we are focusing on providing quick and easy ways to take advantage of some great tools built into Apple's operating sytem. One of these tools can help you with language (definitions, pronunciations, synonyms, and antonyms) and is an indispensable tool in any classroom. I'm referring to the built-in Dictionary application, of course. But it's not just the application you launch and use directly that is so powerful in OS X. It's the convenience of this tool that makes it so useful.

A dictionary is a standard resource in almost all classrooms. It is used by teachers and students alike to confirm spelling, pronunciation and proper usage. There are several online dictionary services that are easy to use and quite convenient, but what if you don't want to take the time to access an online dictionary, or you don't have that option due to no network connection while you're working?

The real power of an integrated dictionary is being able to look up a word in almost any Apple application with a quick command or mouse click.

Using the Dictionary Application

Let's look at the Dictionary application first. By default the Dictionary program is installed in the Applications directory of your hard drive.

The Dictionary uses the Oxford American Dictionary by default. It presents you with a simple and efficient interface where you can enter a word in the search box. The Dictionary will start searching as you type. This behavior helps learners discover spelling mistakes as they type. As you enter letters in the search box, the Dictionary finds all matching words dynamically and presents the list as you type. Stop typing before you completely spell the word and you are shown the current list of matching words.

Double clicking on a word in the list will present that word in the window. If you continue to type your word and only one match is found, it is displayed in the window.

The window provides the dictionary and thesaurus entries for your word. Each section can be collapsed using the small grey arrow to the left of that section's title. The entries will look familiar to you if you've used any standard paper dictionary. In this window you are provided with:

The syllable breaks.
The pronunciation key with accent marks.
The part of speech (with available inflected forms).
The definition with short examples of use.
The derivatives.
The usage or phrases of the word if applicable.
The etymology or origin of the word.
The thesaurus entries with synonyms and antonyms.

All of the text can be copied and pasted elsewhere if needed, which is to be expected, but if you double click on any word in the window you are immediately taken to that entry in the Dictionary. This makes the intellectual game of looking up words and looking up associated words or referenced words much faster than leafing through the massive tome your local public library provides.

Were you so inclined, you could spend quite a bit of time just double clicking words as you read each entry and thus increase your vocabulary and impress your friends (or alienate them a bit).

Using Dictionary in other Mac OS X Applications

You'd think that this alone would be enough to satisfy your linguistic curiousity, but wait, there's more!

What if you're browsing the web with Safari or working on a document in Pages (or almost any Apple application) and you'd like to look up a word or find a synonym for that too frequently used word you keep typing? Enter the contextual menu and the inline dictionary.

Fortunately, there are several ways to look up a word you see in an Apple application such as Safari, Pages, Keynote, TextEdit, Mail or many other programs.

One method will open the Dictionary application with the selected word presented. If you right click (or Control-click) on a word, you will get a contextual menu with an option to Look Up in Dictionary. This launches the Dictionary application and locates the word for you. This method does not provide the thesaurus entry, just the dictionary entry (this is based on a preference in the Dictionary application. See below).
Another method will create a small pop-up window directly in your application with the definition of the word currently under your cursor. To open this window, press the Control (ctrl) and Command (historically known as the Apple key), and then press the letter D key. Whatever word is under your cursor will be highlighted and defined in the Dictionary panel. You can let go of the keys at this point and use the scroll bar in the window, change from the dictionary entry to the thesaurus entry with the small menu in the lower left, or open the word in the full Dictionary application by clicking the More... text. Unfortunately, you can't copy any text from the Dictionary panel.

Now you're thinking there can't possibly be more you need or want, but wait, there is more!

If you don't let go of the control and command keys you can move your mouse around on the screen and each word your mouse hovers over will show the same pop-up window with the dictionary entry for that word. You need to try it to see a good example. Put your cursor over this word, hold down the Control, Command and D keys and then move your mouse around. Go ahead, I'll wait...

This works in almost all Apple applications, such as Safari, Keynote, Pages, TextEdit, and Mail. Try it in your favorite Apple programs.

Configuring Dictionary's Preferences

Before we close, let's go back to the Dictionary application and talk about the preferences. The Dictionary program lets you set a few options. From the Dictionary menu, select Preferences.

You can turn specific dictionaries on or off, and you can drag and drop them in the order you'd prefer the Dictionary application present them. This changes which entry you'll see with the contextual or keyboard shortcut steps above. Changes here will also change the Dictionary panel view.

You can also set the pronunciation preference with the radio buttons in that section as well as the default behavior of the Look Up in Dictionary contextual menu option. This can make your right click or Control-click open the small Dictionary panel so you don't have to use the Control, Command, D keyboard shortcut. Finally, you can set the default font size for the Dictionary application.

Conclusion

I hope this gives you some new tools for improving your writing and vocabulary as you use your computer. With Apple's Dictionary tools the correct spelling, pronunciation and definition of almost any word on your screen is literally at your fingertips.

I always welcome your comments, questions and criticisms regarding the articles in TechEd on Macinstruct. Please e-mail me directly at cthacker@macinstruct.com.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Charles Thacker has been working in public education since 1994 as an art
educator, network administrator and most recently as the Chief Technology
Officer for Farmington Municipal Schools. His areas of focus are OS X client and server management in an enterprise environment, automated imaging techniques, unified
communications and VoIP in a cross-platform network, with some digital imaging and desktop publishing work when time allows.