The Final WORD . . . for now

.

‘Noooooooooooooo!’

TRINIDAD, California — That’s a direct quote, give or take a few o’s. 

It’s what he was saying, over and over, as the nice men in the nice white coats with the little green “St. Mumbles” patch on the left arm loaded the WORD into the padded van for the annual pilgrimage to The Home for a summer of R&R and intense conjugation and lexicography treatments.

“I can’t go now,” he pleaded to anyone who would listen. “Any minute, any second! that Dope with the cheesy hair is doing to say or do something stupid again. How will all those poor, frightened WORDsters cope without me?”

On the other hand, the sudden silence of the WORD’s absence as the padded truck trundled down the road and headed up Hwy. 101 to St. Mumbles Home for the Terminally Verbose was blessed indeed. The WORD’s 21st season was in the books.

Somewhere in the redwoods, a woman was singing.

And somewhere in Washington, someone was yelling on Twitter.

What’s the News?

“The truth is, we know so little about life, we don't really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.” 

―Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), writer, A Man Without a Country, 2005.

• Editorial Comment: See you kids in August. You’ll be fine.


PeezPix by Ted Pease

Seastack Morning








Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet, to infinity and beyond. If you have recovered from whatever illness led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) #tedsword
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“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

The Final WORD . . . for now

.

‘Noooooooooooooo!’

TRINIDAD, California — That’s a direct quote, give or take a few o’s. 

It’s what he was saying, over and over, as the nice men in the nice white coast with the little green “St. Mumbles” patch on the left arm loaded the WORD into the padded van for the annual pilgrimage to The Home for a summer of R&R and intense conjugation and lexicography treatments.

“I can’t go now,” he pleaded to anyone who would listen. “Any minute, any second! that Dope with the cheesy hair is doing to say or do something stupid again. How will all those poor, frightened WORDsters cope without me?”

On the other hand, the sudden silence of the WORD’s absence as the padded truck trundled down the road and headed up Hwy. 101 to St. Mumbles Home for the Terminally Verbose was blessed indeed. The WORD’s 21st season was in the books.

Somewhere in the redwoods, a woman was singing.

And somewhere in Washington, someone was yelling on Twitter.

What’s the News?

“The truth is, we know so little about life, we don't really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.” 

―Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), writer, A Man Without a Country, 2005.

• Editorial Comment: See you kids in August. You’ll be fine.


PeezPix by Ted Pease

Seastack Morning








Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet, to infinity and beyond. If you have recovered from whatever illness led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) #tedsword
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“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

Pathetic Critics

.

Point-Counterpoint

Donald Trump, addressing Liberty University commencement: “Nothing is easier — or more pathetic — than being a critic, because they’re people that can’t get the job done.”

Mary McNamara, LA Times television critic: “Well, the obvious first response is that this is pretty rich coming from a man who has spent years criticizing many, many people including and especially President Obama, mostly through the facile and pot-shotty platform of Twitter. Perhaps that is what he means by ‘nothing is easier than being a critic.’

“Still, even that sort of criticism remains an important part of our democracy, which was, after all, born of criticism. What were the founding father if not critics?" 

—James Warren’s “Morning MediaWire,” The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, May 15, 2017

• Editorial Comment: What would that critical SOB Tom Jefferson say?


PeezPix by Ted Pease

Red Gold and Mean Green












Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet, to infinity and beyond. If you have recovered from whatever illness led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) #tedsword
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“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

Sophistry

.

Donald’s Damage

“One of the more pernicious and insidious effects of the Donald Trump regime may well be the damage he does to language itself.

“Trumpian language is a thing unto itself: some manner of sophistry peppered with superlatives. It is a way of speech that defies the Reed-Kellogg sentence diagram. It is a jumble of incomplete thoughts stitched together with arrogance and ignorance.”

 

—Charles M. Blow, columnist, “Trump’s Degradation of the Language,” The New York Times, May 1, 2017. (Thanks to alert WORDster Alexandra Halsey)

• Editorial Comment: Do we not understand him, or are we afraid we do?


PeezPix by Ted Pease

Cowflappers








Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet, to infinity and beyond. If you have recovered from whatever illness led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) #tedsword
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“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

Pudding, facts and . . .

.

. . . Reality

“Reality is more slippery than a pocketful of pudding. . . . [F]acts, even a lot of facts, do not constitute reality. Reality is what forms after we filter, arrange, and prioritize those facts and marinate them in our values and traditions. Reality is personal.”

—Brooke Gladstone, radio host and author of The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time, 2017

• Editorial Comment: Reality is giving me a headache.


PeezPix by Ted Pease

In the Bushes












Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email every weekday morning during WORD season. This is a free “service” sent to the 2,000,000 or so misguided subscribers around the planet, to infinity and beyond. If you have recovered from whatever illness led you to subscribe and don’t want it anymore, send “unsubscribe” to ted.pease@gmail.com. Or if you want to afflict someone else, send me the email address and watch the fun begin. (Disclaimer: I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em. But all contain at least a kernel of insight. Don’t shoot the messenger.) #tedsword
 
Ted Pease, Professor of Interesting Stuff, Trinidad, California. (Be)Friend The WORD

“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