SEASON 14! The WORD Is Baaaaa-aaaack!

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Riled by ‘Stephen-Come-Lately Colbert,’ The WORD
Escapes Sanitarium for Season 14 of Pithy Wisdom

LOGAN, Utah—Sure as the swallows return to Capistrano, as students flood back onto campuses, as professors steel themselves for another academic year—well, perhaps more like the buzzards that flock back to Hinckley, Ohio every year—Today’s WORD on Journalism broke out of its padded maximum conjugation cubicle sometime in the pre-dawn Monday.

Doctors and overly thesarused white-coated attendants at St. Mumbles Home for the Terminally Verbose on a rocky crag overlooking the Pacific in Northern California confirmed at 6 a.m. (MDT) today that the WORD is once more free to afflict a news-addled planet with more pithy “wisdom” on journalism, the mass media, and a nearly extinct superannuated institution, the press.

The first panicky whispers came shortly after 2 a.m. as the dreamless sleep of the blissfully ignorant was rent by the first murky soundbites of quotable insight.

Contacted in his crypt, former President Thomas Jefferson rescinded his famous edict—“No government ought to be without censors & where the press is free, no one ever will,” saying, “I take it back. If the WORD is this generation’s version of truth and wisdom, then we’re better off with Lost.”

Reportedly, one of the things that really ticked off the WORD has been the misappropriation of its moniker not only by organized religion, but apparently especially, by Comedy Central pundit and interloper Stephen Colbert, whose feature “The Word” increasingly impinges on this WORD’s territory.

Over recent weeks, snoozing uneasily beneath stacks of Bartlett’s, Brainy Quotes and Marvel comics, St. Mumbles officials reported, the WORD has been thrashing in his uneasy sleep, muttering, “Truthiness!” and other obscure epithets. Taking a page, literally, from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s prescription, “All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath,” the WORD seems to have escaped St. Mumbles by boat.

“There is some slim hope that he fell overboard and drowned,” one officer at the scene said.

As the mingled joy and horror spread, the news that the WORD had once again shimmied down the drainpipe at St. Mumbles to launch its 14th horrific season of punditry and verbiage prompted the most violent response in the journalism department at Utah State University, which spawned the global online affliction in 1995.

(NOTE: If you are one of Professor Pease’s students—and if you are, everyone pities you—your assignment is to define both “punditry” and “verbiage,” and use each in a sentence that makes their meaning clear. Note: Wikipedia is NOT an accepted source! “Truthiness,” too, for that matter.)

Back-story: The WORD was originally concocted (“conceived” is, I think, altogether too grand) as a way to get journalism students to pay attention to their email. Strange as it may sound, email was in 1995 a new and unpleasant disturbance of the general peace, and many students did not then spend 16 hours a day online. As a professor hoping to get and keep their attention while also instructing them, my object was that the WORD would give them something to think about before class. Hope, like the WORD, springs eternal.

I think it’s fair to say that this strategy was a dismal failure. Most of my students continue to ignore their daily WORDs and gaily accept point reductions on their quizzes for not knowing the day's wordish wisdom from philosophers ranging from Soren Kierkegaard to Brian Williams to Lisa Simpson.

But the WORD has become rather frighteningly popular with non-students, purported grown-ups, mostly, who actually ask to be afflicted or who send email addresses of unsuspecting friends/colleagues/parents/bosses, so that they might be victimized as well.

When the WORD was trundled by those nice white-jacketed men into St. Mumbles Sanitarium last spring, nearly 1,800 (mostly volunteer) victims subscribed to the direct email WORD list. More got the WORD by checking the website, whence it was forwarded like a pox to many more unsuspecting victims by so-called “friends.”

As usual, we launch this season with the ever-useful wisdom of the genial former colonial Royal High Pontentate of the Virginia Colony, whose high regard for both education and the press still rings with an increasingly popular fervor today. Enjoy!

TODAY’S WORD ON JOURNALISM—The Season Opener

“I thank God we have no free schools or printing, and I hope that we shall not have these for a hundred years. For learning has brought disobediences and heresy and sects into the world; and printing has divulged them and libels against the government. God keep us from both.”

—Sir William Berkeley
Governor, Virginia Colony, 1671

And that’s the WORD.

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