Tag: language

On the young’uns and their talk

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching3 Comments

I do this thing nowadays where when I come up with something I want to talk about I now have to take a minute and decide whether I want to put it on the blog or TikTok. I think this one is actually going to go both places, but framed differently. I have to be briefer and funnier over there than I think is necessary on the blog– not that brief and funny isn’t good here, but I think people have more patience with prose than they do with video.

That out of the way, does anyone out there– and I’m talking mostly to the teachers who might be reading this– feel like the jump in new slang terms from last year to this year has been more thorough than any particular single year of school? New words and phrases emerge all the time, of course, and no group of kids speaks exactly like the one a year before or a year after them, and definitely not like the ones two years before or after them. But there’s something going on this year where these kids are throwing around a lot of words that I’ve not seen in previous years, to a degree that I feel like I’ve never seen before.

Some are more obvious than others (you know what “sus” means the first time you hear it) and others are a little bit more difficult– everything in the universe is either “cap” or “no cap” to my 8th graders right now, and I haven’t, uh, sussed out exactly what that one means yet. But there’s something going on here. It’s not just that I’m getting older; this has been a thing for my entire career, because it’s how youth culture works. I was too old for middle school slang when I was out of college; I’m not really any more too old for it at 44.

On pronouns

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics, Reading1 Comment

My pronouns are he/him/his. This should not come as a surprise to anyone as I suspect my identity as a cis male is fairly obvious, at least to anyone who notices the traditionally male name affixed to the site, and certainly to anyone who has ever seen me in person. There was a time when my hair was long, curly, and glorious, and I was addressed as “ma’am” once or twice in public in my college years only to have the person hastily correct themselves upon seeing what the front of my head looks like.

To be clear, I think normalizing making your pronouns explicit even if you’re cisgendered is a good thing. At least two of my online profiles (Twitter and TikTok) contain them, and I do my best to call people what they want me to call them. There have been times where I’ve had to discreetly inquire of a third party what someone’s pronouns were, and I’ve had students recently who either wanted to be they/them or were out as trans, at least in my classroom. Those types of kids are the exact reason I do stuff like this. I feel like it’s the right thing to do.

I’m not going to review Dr. Meera Shah’s You’re the Only One I’ve Told: The Stories Behind Abortion, or at least not beyond this paragraph, and the reason is that you already know everything you need to know about the book from the title, including whether you want to read it. It’s not a bad book by any means, but it’s also not really surprising in any way.

Well, okay, the way it handles pronouns is kinda strange, and I wanted to talk about that a little bit. Now, this is a book about abortion, so you won’t be surprised to learn that the subjects of nearly every chapter are people who can get pregnant, and nearly all of those are cisgendered women. One chapter focuses on a cis man, whose name is Mateo, and that chapter focuses on the effect that abortion can have on the partners of the people who get abortions. One subject identifies as genderqueer and is they/them.

Every single chapter is titled with the name of the main subject of the chapter, with their pronouns, italicized, in a smaller font, and in parentheses, below the person’s name, along with the word “Pronouns”. So, like this:

BEATRICE

(Pronouns: She/her/hers)

Also, when other individuals are introduced throughout the text, their pronouns are also provided immediately after their name is first used– but oddly inconsistently, as it’s not used for everyone. (I swear that Dr. Shah directly addresses her rationale for this at some point in the book, but I can’t find it, and it doesn’t appear to be in the introduction, which is the most obvious place.)

At any rate, that’s what triggered the post: because for some reason this became distracting as hell over the course of the book, and I wanted to kind of talk it out and see if anybody pushed back at me. Putting your pronouns on a profile (or, as I did at a con once, on a sticker that you’re wearing) has the advantage of letting strangers know how to refer to you. Again, sometimes it’s more obvious than others– no one is going to look at me and call me “she” unless explicitly told to– but I get why it’s a thing and I participate in it.

This book does things like this:

When I spoke to Dr. Hoobity (Pronouns: she/her/hers), she told me that…

Not a direct quote, but stuff like that happens all the time– an explicit listing of the person’s personal pronouns, annoyingly including the word “pronouns,” immediately followed by a use of one of those pronouns. That risk of confusion or causing inadvertent offense just isn’t present when you’re writing about someone, because you’re going to use pronouns all the time. It’s hard to write about people without using pronouns, and in a book that is about people who can get pregnant it becomes even more ridiculous because nearly everyone identifies as she/her. Even the genderqueer person’s pronouns are explicit nearly immediately; the first use of singular they made it clear very quickly, and they talked about being genderqueer in the chapter. I was fully expecting (and would have been interested to read) a chapter at some point about a trans male’s experience with pregnancy and abortion, but it never happened. The one chapter about a person identifying as male is Mateo’s, and he’s cis, and his chapter is basically about cis men.

It didn’t ruin the book or anything like that, don’t get me wrong, but it was distracting enough that, well, I wrote the post about pronouns instead of about the actual book. Am I off-base here, or do other people feel like this would be distracting for them as well?

On actual helpful ed tech

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

I am tired– okay, that’s always true, but it’s basically bedtime and I just wanted to take a moment for this– and so this will be a brief piece, but: my lesson for my 8th graders today involved something that I don’t do a lot in my classes: note-taking. I defined and provided a bunch of examples of rational numbers and irrational numbers, mostly me talking and writing on the board and the kids being surprisingly dutiful about writing it all down.

I have a student in one of my classes who speaks basically no English at all. She is– there is some debate about this, and every time I remember to just cut to the chase and ask her about it, she’s not in the room– either from Mexico or Guatemala, or possibly Guatemala via Mexico, I’m not sure, and she only speaks Spanish.

She uses Google Translate to get by in my classroom. I’ve got her paired with another kid who speaks a moderate amount of Spanish and they have their Chromebooks out at all times and the one kid will translate anything important I say into Spanish for her. Unfortunately, this wasn’t working very well today, since I was writing quite a bit and the other girl had to take her own notes as we were going.

She came up to me and told me (in English, which I was impressed by) that she didn’t understand what I’d said after the lecture, and the amazing thing is that between my own limited-but-not-nonexistent Spanish abilities and the translation software I was able to translate all of the notes for her in maybe an extra five or six minutes. At which point she happily– and, I noted, accurately– did her assignment.

I am very old-school in my teaching despite having spent last year literally working as an ed tech advocate. It’s nice when something works like it’s supposed to and actually makes my job easier.

In which I remember your life better than you do

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching5 Comments

I haven’t done an education post in a good long while; let’s see if I’ve still got the chops.  Seen this lately?  It’s making the rounds on DevilBook:

31483742_10209939830931981_3036515949554434048_nI succumbed to my baser urges and replied to it on one person’s page, and let me make it clear that I’m not holding her responsible for this, as the notion “Americans should be better educated” is one that I’m gonna hold to and agree with pretty much no matter what the circumstances.  However, what I’m not gonna be okay with is the idea that most of these concepts (and others like them; there are several variants of this little meme picture) aren’t taught in school.

They are.  In damn near every high school in America and most of the middle schools too.  I have personally taught about at least half of these things.  You just didn’t pay attention, because you were a dumbass kid and this was adult stuff and it was boring.  The problem is no one ever writes a meme post about “Shit I should have paid better attention to in school.”  It’s always the teachers’ fault.

You took an econ class in high school, right?  It’s mandatory in Indiana.  That class covered accounting, money management, taxes, and credit all by its damn self.  I covered all of those things, excepting only “good credit,” with my middle school classes in a required class you might be familiar with; it was called math.

Nutrition?  I bet you took a Health class at some point.  Required in Indiana in both middle and high school.  Job and careers?  I actually taught a class called Careers to middle school kids.  Pretty sure something similar exists in high school too.  Self-defense, okay, I’ll give you that one, but the rest of them?  Give me a damn break.  If you weren’t paying attention, I don’t even blame you, because expecting little kids to be intimately curious about shit that won’t affect their lives for ten or fifteen years is a little unreasonable, but the idea that the subjects were never covered is nonsense.  They were mandatory.  You just blew them off.  And that’s on you.

A moment, then, on the last part, about being “forced” to be “fluent” in at least one other language.  I am actually pro-foreign language education.  I just think that goddamn near everyone in America should be taking Spanish.  A solid majority of American citizens, especially anyone who works in a job facing the public, could do with, if not fluency, at least a passable working knowledge of Spanish, enough to get through a basic conversation.  I’ve had some furniture sales that were conducted damn near entirely in Spanish and I’m not remotely fluent.  But I can get by if I need to.  That level.

The notion that Americans, as a whole, require something called “fluency” in any language other than English is fucking ridiculous, though.  Is it good?  Sure.  Is it necessary?  Crazy talk.  Go ahead, bring up Europe.  Europe has 300 languages because when Europe was growing up you were going to be born, live, and die within fifteen miles or so of the same goddamn spot and it’s easy for languages to bifurcate and split during a couple of millennia of that type of social evolution.  Africa, Asia, same thing.

America?  America used to have lots of languages until the white folk moved in and killed everybody who spoke them.  Now?  English, party of 350 million.  If I’m in Germany, I can get in my car and drive for eight hours and I’ll for damn sure be somewhere where people speak a language other than German.  If I’m in America and drive for eight hours I may not even be out of my state.  Are there localized pockets of people who speak other languages than English and Spanish?  Sure, tons of ’em, there’s lots of Poles and Pennsylvania Dutch around here, for example.  Are there jobs where knowing another language is useful?  Sure.  Does every American need to “be fluent” in a foreign language?  Come the hell on.

Apropos of nothing, I just looked up and saw this from the window next to my desk:

unnamedThe walls aren’t that yellow, but I haven’t altered the color balance in this picture at all.  In the last ten minutes the temperature has dropped from ninety to sixty, rain has started, and apparently outdoors is in black and white now.  

Weird.

On things I’ve learned recently

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Music2 Comments

Fipurplerain.jpgrst things first: from the “there should be a German word for this” category, I would like to know the German word for the moment when you discover a giant hole in the crotch of your pants at the beginning of an 11-hour work shift and realize that the moment before you discovered that hole was as good as the day was going to get.  There’s a German word for everything, so there’s got to be one.

Brief review of the new bed: I love the fuck out of it.  I would have preferred, however, that we not have a neighborhood-wide power outage the first day we own our new adjustable bed, although I suppose the setting we had it at when the power went out represented some sort of compromise between the universe and ourselves, since it was technically supposed to be a sleeping position and not, say, the “make your bed into a reclining chair” position.  I have since discovered that there is a place on the bed where batteries can be inserted to avoid precisely that scenario but at the time it was a problem.  But I’m sleeping better– way better, in fact– and that’s what counts.

I’m a Prince fan, right?  I have been for a long time– in fact, Purple Rain was one of the first two pieces of music I ever paid for, on cassette, who knows how long ago.  I was trying to hunt down video that didn’t suck of Lenny Kravitz’ tribute to Prince at the 2017  Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony, and finally found some that did suck, and for some reason decided to Google the lyrics to When Doves Cry.

Guys, I’ve been singing the wrong words to When Doves Cry for basically my entire fucking life.

I mean, in my defense, I probably decided I knew the words before I was ten, and maybe I’m just like my mother/ she’s never sad inside and maybe you’re just like my mother/ she’s never satisfied aren’t that far apart, but that wasn’t the only bit I was getting wrong, right?  And it’s like… damn, I’ve heard this song probably once a week for my entire fucking life and I’ve managed to screw it up every single time.  What the hell else have I been doing wrong for my entire life and never realized it until now?

Feel free to share examples of similar idiocy in the comments if you like.

In which I hope this is funny

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized8 Comments

ku-mediumI don’t know how to write this post.  I’ve been working on it in my head for over a week now, and in none of the versions in my head have I hit the tone I like, but this story is either funny enough or weird enough to deserve telling– I just don’t know how to do it right.

Also, here’s a phrase I’ve never used on the blog before, but this is important:  Consider this your trigger warning, if you’re partial to such things.  This will end well, but it will not start well.

I was out of the office for a good chunk of last Tuesday.  When I got back the guy who had been acting as our principal designee (because the principal and AP were both also out of the office) said that there had been a really weird spike in sexual harassment issues during the time we’d been gone.  These things happen in middle school, but they’re not super common, so for multiple things to happen in the same day is odd.  I’m not around for the explanation or the ensuing phone calls; I just know Stuff has Happened.

The next day, I walk into a parent conference with the designee and the assistant principal because I need to talk to my boss for a few minutes, and end up sitting down and being part of the meeting.  Mom is the parent of a fifth grade boy, and he appears to be in grave trouble.  She is expressing two emotions: the first is horror and the second is an almost craven sense of apologeticness, if that’s a word.  She’s so sorry for what he did that it almost hurts me to listen to the conversation.

She keeps saying that when he used “the word” or “that word” that he didn’t really mean what the word actually meant, that they are immigrants and “that word” is used differently in their country.  She looks Hispanic, and so does the boy, and he has a unique first name that really doesn’t scan to any particular ethnic group or nationality that I’m aware of, so I assume “their country” is somewhere in South America.  Then I hear her speak to her son in whatever language they speak at home and it’s clearly not Spanish, but she doesn’t talk long enough for me to get past hey wait that isn’t Spanish and start listening for whatever the language actually is.  The general mood in the room is solemn; I consider leaving but she begins addressing her remarks to me as well as the other two as if I belong there so I don’t.

Eventually, she leaves, insisting that not only will she tell her son to stop using “the word” but that she will stop using “the word” herself, because she knows that the reason this happened is that she’s been setting a terrible example for their son and that she realizes that this is not how things are done in America.

One guess on what I think the word is, right?  There’s only one word in the English language– well, two, maybe— with enough power that someone would refuse to even say it while talking about it.  So he’s called someone the N-word, right?  But that’s not sexual harassment.  It’s a lot of things but it’s not sexual harassment.  So… huh?  Weirdly, though, there’s talk about how she’s pretty sure her son likes the girl he used “the word” around, and… huh.

They leave.  The AP and the other guy exchange a look, both take a deep breath, and then crack up laughing.

“What the hell happened?” I ask.  “What was the deal?”

“He threatened to rape a fifth grade girl,” the AP says, practically wiping tears from her eyes.  The boy, remember, was also a fifth grader.

My eyes widen.  What the fuck are you assholes laughing about?  This is, as you might imagine, a big deal.   I’ve literally never had to deal with a rape threat in a school before.  That’s major.

I express that sentiment.  They laugh harder.

“They’re German,” the AP says, as if that explains it.  I give her a yeah, so the hell what? sort of gesture.

Apparently there is, and if you are German or speak German better than I do please feel free to enlighten me here, some sort of German proverb, or slang expression, or figure of speech, or something, that basically means “stop bugging me” or “leave me alone,” meaning mild, possibly even affectionate harassment– that, when translated into English, comes out as rape.

This woman has been using this phrase, translated, around her son, for years.  She has apparently, and at this point my AP does a picture-perfect impression of this lady, one that causes me to lose it and crack up out of sheer disbelief, on multiple occasions said the phrase “I’m busy, go rape your father” to her son.

Her son, in saying “I’m going to rape you,” to a little girl in his class, meant “I’m gonna get on your nerves.”

And, understandably, this has caused all sorts of merry hell to break loose.  Apparently Mom is fully aware of the word’s connotations in English– how could she not be?– but hasn’t managed to purge the word from her vocabulary, to the point where American friends of hers have actually called her out on it and asked her to stop using it.  You can imagine how this would go, right?  You don’t just drop a loaded term like rape into a conversation without causing a little bit of a hitch here and there.  And, god, if she’s seriously said “Go rape your father” to her son while on the phone with someone else?  What the fuck I don’t even.

This all sounded deeply weird to me, of course, even a little unbelievable, until it hit me that I use the phrases “Are you fucking with me?” and “Are you shitting me?” on a fairly regular basis, and in very much the same way those phrases would be hugely opaque to anyone with no understanding of colloquial English.  This is, presumably, more or less the same phenomenon, only through another filter where it’s been translated.

So… yeah.  I have no idea if anyone reading this is laughing right now, or if you just think that’s an insanely weird conversation to have to have.  I hope you at least understand why I felt like I had to post it.  🙂

I had a post planned for tonight…

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek7 Comments

Jean-Claude-Van-Damme…in the brain parts of my head.  But it’s thinky and I may be beyond the point where I can be thinky tonight.

(Also, WordPress doesn’t think “thinky” is a word, which is annoying.)

Instead I will just point out that I am married to a woman who, earlier tonight, and for no clear reason, decided to use Latin to describe the difference in intensity of her desire for Wendy’s versus her desire for Arby’s.

You are not married to such a woman.

I win.

The end. 

In which I LEARNED IT FROM YOU, DAD!

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting10 Comments

original-1Scene: The boy is laying on the floor, in between the ottoman and the couch, face-down.

BOY:  Fuck fuck fuckin’ fuck.

DADDY:  Tilts head quizzically, listens carefully.  What did you just say?

BOY:  I say fuck fuckin’ fuck.

DADDY:  Tries to suppress laughter.  Kenny, those are mommy and daddy words.  You shouldn’t say mommy and daddy words.

Boy stands up, wanders over to television.

BOY:  Daddy, you say fuckin’ fuck now.

DADDY: Maybe later.  For right now, you don’t say it anymore.

BOY:  Okay, dammit.

I… uh… may have to stop swearing around the house.

(Also, I swear I heard him drop something earlier today and say “goddammit” when he dropped it.  I don’t know why he’s decided to learn every single swear word on the same day like this, but that seems to be what has happened.)