THIS TIME, WE MIGHT ACTUALLY NEED THE WORD BACK
On the one hand, he felt none of the urgency that had infused each of his previous 21 daring and impossible escapes from St. Mumbles Home for the Terminally Verbose (and Overwrittenly Ornate).
Perched on a ledge of rock eight miles out to sea, in the middle of some of the most dangerous waters of the northern California coast, St. Mumbles was a “sanitarium” for the treatment and gentle rehabilitation of those in various stages of addlement, befuddlement and general malaise.
The WORD was such a regular at St. Mumbles that he had his own rocking chair, with his name in Scrabble letters on the back.
But now semi-retired from his longtime job as a professional haranguer, lightbulb-illuminator and left-wing molder of impressionable young minds at what was an otherwise perfectly fine Institution of Higher Learning, the WORD didn’t actually have to get up for classes any more. Why not sleep in?
The WORD examined the note he’d found crammed into a can of Pringles that had washed ashore at the base of the impenetrable fortress-“sanitarium” that had been his dungeon all summer.
“HELP!” the note pleaded in No. 2 pencil. “Do you know what’s going on out here!?! This man is INSANE!!!” Two full lines of exclamation points ended in a hole in the paper and signs of a broken lead.
Well, yes. The WORD did know what was going on out there. At least, he knew what had been going on when the nice men with the broken noses and white coats had jumped him back in May and threw him into the St. Mumbles paddy wagon.
So he’d been grateful for the fur-lined shackles in the white-noise room down in the bowels of St. Mumbles, where he couldn’t hear that dreadful drumpfing noise.
Now, though. . . . Not that he was feeling any better about the state of the world, but he was feeling better, stronger, a little less like his head were going to explode after not listening that awful VOICE all summer.
The WORD sighed. His peeps needed him to help them make sense of a nonsensical world. Sigh.
So the WORD buckled on his favorite Roget’s, scribbled a note to his Scrabble teammates, and trudged down to the kelpy south end of St. Mumbles’ rock to hitch a ride with an eastbound sea lion.
It was time to get back into the game, Drumpf or High Dudgeon. “Geronimooooooooh!” the WORDmeister observed, leaping into the surf.
• • •
Editor’s Note: 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 2017-2018 season, assuming we live that long, or until you come to your senses. Enjoy!
• • •
TODAY’S WORD ON JOURNALISM—The Perennial Season Opener
—Sir William Berkeley, Governor, Virginia Colony, 1671
Back-story: The WORD was originally concocted (“conceived” is, I think we all agree, 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 ignored their daily WORDs and gaily accepted point reductions on their quizzes for not knowing that 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, about 2,000,0000 victims voluntarily 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.”
PeezPix by Ted Pease
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
“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.” —Tom Stoppard
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