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ABOARD THE U.S. COAST GUARD CUTTER DORADO — BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!
(Copy editor colleagues: How would you guys spell that klaxon noise?)
The call came out from the control station on the island containing the St. Mumbles Home from the Terminally Verbose, eight miles off the northern California Coast. The friggin’ @#$%^&*%$#@#$%^&* WORD had escaped again to torment the world with its daily harangement about the press, politics, words, free expression and thought.
During Election 2016, the Year of The Drumpf, such discussion may be completely extraneous. After all, such Big Thinkers as Jon Stewart abandoned his pulpit before this %^*(*&^ hit the fan, and he’s a much happier man for it. Stephen Colbeeeert seems compass-less, and John Oliver has blood running out of his ears. And let’s not even go to Sean Hannity and his ilk.
Sure enough. The sneaky WORD had slipped overboard during a “therapy” on a rowboat from the St. Mumbles facility where it had been incarcerated — in theory, in high security — since late May. As everyone knows, the WORD is a highly incinderary daily spam of quotes about the press. This year, the darn thing could set off worldwide idiocy.
Wait. We already have that. Well, it could get worse.
The officers in charge of security and bakery at St. Mumbles hard nothing to say. It's the 21st year that the WORD, its worse recidivist escapee, has gotten away to torment the world. Just up the coast, Pelican Bay — a maximum-security prison for some of the country’s worst marijuana offenders — seems to be able to hold onto its inmates. Chief of Verbosity Containment Phil O’Shaddup, the disgraced former
Guantanamo interrogation chief, reshuffled his size-14 regulation golf
shoes in discomfort. The WORD is out.
Again.
The WORD — formally “Today’s WORD on Journalism” — a pesky and recidivist quoter (some say misquoter)
of pithy phrases on journalism and the “lamestream press,” language,
politics, and the role of public engagement in an informed civil society
(OK, OK, perfesser, move it along . . . !), today did what GOP presidential candidate The Don and thousands of crack TSA staff have said was
impossible.
“We will build a moat around that place,” The Drumpf declaimed of the island facility. “And the prisoners and alligators will pay for it!”
Since
1995, The WORD has tormented an already uneasy planet with statements
on the press. Since first apprehended, edited and sent in to the feared
hammock-strewn and Scrabble-laden maximum security facility, St. Mumbles Home for the Terminally Verbose,
in 1996, The WORD today celebrated the new school year by slipping away
(again. did we mention this is the 21st year?) from the remote
sanitarium (or is that sanitorium?) on a remote luxury rock miles out in
the Pacific Ocean 370 miles north of San Francisco.
This season is the first that WORDmeister — who really should have a better grip on his creature — is no longer a professor. “I don’t care,” he said. “ I’m retired. You’re on your own.”
The St. Mumbles staff wasn’t even embarrassed. “We really thought we had clamped down on the SOB this time,” observed St. Mumbles High & Mighty Censor and Comma Queen Mary Norris. Brought aboard after an embarrassing 2014
escape and multiple conjunction, apparently involving friendly borking sea lions, it became
Norris’s job to keep The WORD “in his goddam footnote cell.”
“Apparently, there, were, Oxford, commas, involved” in this year’s escape, Norris said.
While
some in the Drumpf campaign spinned
— “Could be bad, but maybe not,” many in
the larger WORD community, which has swelled to nearly 2,000,000,0000 worldwide
in recent years, cheered.
“YAY!!!”
yelled misguided 13-year WORD subscriber Conn Jugate of Haybale, Iowa.
“We’ve lost Colbear and Jon Stewie. How can we have a campaign
embarrassment without good old WORDie?”
According to a thin-lipped report from O’Shaddup’s spokesperson,
delivered after the failed lexicographer had flung himself into the surf, the WORD
apparently spent the summer on the St. Mumbles’ veranda knitting a rubber
Zodiac-style raft, and made a 6-horsepower outboard in the arts and crafts program.
“He said he
was knitting an afghan for his Twitter editor,” said watch commander Mia Opia as
attendants rescued a burbling sanitarium director from the froth. “Like anyone edits Twitter!”
The WORD, whose daily doses of “wisdom” on matters
journalistic, political, social and cultural have afflicted decent folk on five
continents since 1995, had been a, er, “guest” at St. Mumbles since May, when
white-jacketed attendants collected the blathering serial quoter and the
contents of his office from its refuge in the redwoods of northern California.
He spent the summer convalescing at the remote coastal
rest home, a dark tower where Chas. Addams once vacationed, studying up on the
5,000 new words in the Scrabble dictionary, lounging on the porch and secretly
collecting new quotes on the press to torment a troubled media world.
The WORD was first admitted and first escaped from St.
Mumbles in 1996 after a ground-breaking opening season quoting wise guys on journalism. Since
then, the WORD’s, um, “influence” has spread worldwide, and last year the
International Bloviaters League and Tribune of Hairbrained Editors &
Reporters (IBLaTHER) honored the serial email pest with its coveted Electronic Junkmail
Award. History on the WORD and its storied 21-year tradition is below. Full archives are at tedsword.blogspot.com.
Anyway, the WORD is out again, gentle and unsuspecting
readers. Brace yourselves.
Per tradition, we launch this season with the ever-useful
wisdom of the genial colonial Royal High Potentate of the Virginia
Colony, whose high regard for both education and the press rings with an
increasingly popular fervor today. New WORDs begin tomorrow, and will continue
through the 2016-2017 season, or until you come to your senses. Enjoy!
• • •
TODAY’S WORD ON JOURNALISM—The Perennial 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
•
• •
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 a new and
unpleasant disturbance of the general peace back in 1995, 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 last spring, 2,000 (mostly volunteer) victims
subscribed to the direct email WORD list. More got the WORD by checking the
website, whence it was linked and Tweeted and forwarded like a pox to many more
unsuspecting victims by so-called “friends.”
• • • • •
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff. ted.pease@gmail.com. (Be)Friend Dr. Ted, Professor of Interesting Stuff on Facebook
“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
