Too Bad

I am sorry that Fred Thompson has decided to bow out of the race. He was the one person who came close to my own beliefs. I had to be careful not to confuse his Law and Order persona with his political one, but I think I had it pretty straight. The media did not give him a very fair hearing. They did not seem to understand the more-than-sound-bite sentences he would use to explain himself. I guess no one told him about considering audience. Grade school children can only tolerate sentences of a certain length. Maybe the audiences created by media have the same limitations. So sad. There was a bit of Willie Stark (Talos) about Thompson in this race, the good, sincere part when Willie started out, before he began compromising himself. Now I can only guess if Thompson could have remained corruption free.

To Bee. . .

My daughter has a blog in which she has mentioned Bishop Braxton of the Belleville, Illinois, Diocese on a couple of occasions. He is not exactly Mr. Friendly and he has a way of spending on lavish surroundings. She has personal experience of the man at a Confirmation. I know him only by reputation. Two other men I know by their reputations are our current leader, Pope Benedict XVI, and the St. Louis Archbishop, Raymond Burke. I am frankly not sure about the pope. Take his recent cancellation of a talk at a secular university in Italy. Does he place faith above reason as the university's physicists, and an earlier speech when the pope was a cardinal, suggested? I would have to look into that further and count on translations. Then there is Burke and his excommunicating of Catholics who would not surrender their parish and its funds to the diocese, a tricky legal question. All three men irritate me. I have always seen myself as just as much the church as any of the hierarchy, but such letter of the law leaders still prove to be an irritation. They are just below the surface of my skin only occasionally flaring into break-outs. Braxton's most recent is his possible misuse of missions funds. Of course, that is not letter of the law, but I think the behavior exemplifies the problems we Catholics must face in our traditionally hierarchical organization.
I like what a nun told my daughter she had nicknamed the three men to whom I refer above: the Killer Bees. How fitting.

Inadequacy at Any Age

This evening Brain, from the televised cartoon Pinky and the Brain, pretty much summed up what I have been feeling lately: "I am middle aged and all I have to show for it is a sagging waist line and a roommate who thinks lint is a delicacy."

Higher Ed

I was reading an article on the Inside Higher Ed--Daily Update about the abundance of PhDs in the arts and sciences and the dearth of tenure track teaching positions. Once again, I am of two minds.
There is something about tenure that rubs against the grain. It is the permanence of the achievement that bothers me. At the community college I just left, I saw newly hired full time instructors (assistant professors? terminology may vary from institution to institution) working diligently to get noticed by longer termed faculty. The newbies would serve on various committees, offer the fresh insights, come up with ideas and follow through with same, infuse lessons with excitement, experiment with technology, and generally keep their departments moving. Personally, I always saw all the activity as partly inspired by the new opportunity and partly driven by the requirements of their tenure committees. The stark disparity between the newbies and some of the seasoned faculty was striking. Whining about committee work, oft expressed despair at students' inability to perform, entrenched philosophies, bullying, and worn lessons or the infamous newspaper-reading-while-students-work-on-their-own approach characterized at least a few of the tenured folks. Like unions, I am sure there was a good reason for tenure at one time, but I wonder if there is at least some abuse. When I read someone's complaint about not enough tenure track positions at the university level, I tend to think of what that protective bubble can produce, and the article begins to sound whiny.
On the other hand, or in my other mind, I comprehend the probems created by the ratio of full to part time faculty. Where I worked, that was 80% to 20% in both faculty and support staff. From what I have seen, that is not atypical. So a student at that community college had an 8 in 10 chance of getting an adjunct instructor after being advised by a part time counselor. The student might then check on financial aid and be helped by a thirty hour a week clerk who depends and a woman in accounting, a man in IT, and a registration clerk who are all part time. Once the student gets into the semester and needs help, she will get tutoring from a math specialist and do research with a library aide who are also limited in weekly hours. There is no such thing as prorated benefits for the adjuncts and only leave accrues for the part time employees. Of course there are wonderfully motivated people in all of the positions mentioned, but the chance of burn out, leading to poor performance and high turn over, has to be omnipresent. So the system is definitely broken. I'm just not convinced more of the same, more tenure track positions, would be the cure.

Impact

Just when did impact become a verb for anything outside of medical/dental circles? I had a professor in grad school back in the '90s who was already disgruntled by the word's use, so it has been working its way into everyday conversation for a while. You know what I mean. "The shooting impacted the neighbors." I get this mental picture of neighbors all shoved together in a garage for safety--like teeth in a jaw with nowhere to go. The use of impact as a verb, really shorthand for make an impact, has to be directly attributed to news anchors. Again, like transparency and closure, the word impact sounds just a little more important that it really is, like the speaker knows just a little more than the listener or at least is in the know. He or she is in the club. It is similar to all the academic types who loved shifting paradigms back in the '90s. But, back to impact, I think I would like to coin a term ala Bucky of Darby Conley's Get Fuzzy when he came up with "verbify." In his case, he was talking about just what I am, the misuse, creation, or manipulation of words into roles where they do not belong. I would like to add the term mediafy. The definition is to verbify but only when done by, or at least lead by, the media. So this whole impact thing falls under mediafication. I feel really smart and smug right now, but my head hurts. I think I'll have a lie down.

Splitting Infinitives

I love the English language. I love language of all sorts, the idea that we manage to communicate and sometimes get it right. Because I love language, I sometimes become protective of it. Although I like the idea of flux in grammar and words, what we have accepted in order to communicate well should not be treated frivolously. Some poetic license can be inspiring, but repeated, erroneous word use irritates me.
One aspect of word use that gets to me is overuse, often by the media, of a term that is supposed to be bigger than itself. One recent example is the word transparency when applied to government or industry. To demand transparency makes one sound so bloody cool. Let the Mitchell report on drug use in baseball exhibit transparency. That solves everything, doesn't it? If only all of politics were transparent.
Another overused, bigger than life term is closure. I do have sympathy for people who are caught on camera after losing a loved one to crime, at least the first time they are "caught" by the camera. I do wonder if there are a few ringers who travel from crisis to crisis to moan about what a good boy he was before he got into drugs, and, oh all we need is some closure. But today I was thrilled by the front page article in the St. Louis Post about the "closure" of Highway 40. At last, closure! Why aren't we all celebrating? Where are the toothless aunts and uncles and cousins who have longed for closure, never having only sought media attention for themselves? Now is the time to come out of the woodwork and dance on the highway. Enough of the nay-saying about traffic problems. We finally have closure.