Kicking & Screaming

A Reluctant WORD Returns to a Troubled World

For 22 years, the WORD has eagerly charged into the fray, afflicting both the wary and the un- with daily snippets of wit and occasional wisdom about news and the world.

This year, however, the news is uniformly bad, and the world seems beset by widespread queasiness. At least, that’s how Today’s WORD on Journalism perceives it. “Fake news!” he yelled through a locked door. “Whaddaya mean, fake news!?”

For the past week or more, the nice white-coated men with broken noses at St. Mumbles Home for the Terminally Verbose have been unsuccessful in prying the sanitarium’s most famous inmate from the warm, safe, sound-proofed cell deep in the basement where he has hidden since bolting himself in last June 1.

“Usually, he’s rarin’ to go,” said activities coordinator and hammock coach Comma Splice. “This year, I dunno, something’s broke.”

When he was readmitted into St. Mumbles three months ago after a brutal 22nd season, wearing only a tassled Argyle strait jacket and weary smile of relief, all he could be heard to say was, “I’m sorry. So sorry,” punctuated by something sounding like “Cheeto Asshat.”
 
Before bolting himself into his padded cubicle in June, he said to tell his misguided adherents on the Outside, “You’re too marvelous. I don’t have any words.”

“He has plenty of words now,” said St. Mumbles Head Grammarian Con Jugate. “But they all seem to make him unbearably sad, poor sod.”

Like many folk, the WORD has preferred to close the world and its news — fake and real — out.

Sunday night, however, he emerged from a 4-hour conference call with Rachel Maddow, Tyrion Lannister, Sasha Baron Cohen, Christiane Amanpour and Ruth Bader Ginsburg looking stronger, a little more optimistic, standing a little straighter in his dirty “St. Mum’s Scrabble Squad” nightshirt.

“Yup, he had color in his cheeks,” an attendant reported “Of course, he would after sitting that long.”

St. Mumbles authorities say the WORD was packing his duffel, and has asked for a Tuesday 4:30 a.m. wakeup call.

Fair warning to a troubled planet: It looks like the WORD’s 23rd season is about to kick off. Watch yourself, Cheeto Asshat. And that’s no fake news.

• • •

A WORD of Explanation: The WORD first troubled a then-innocent world with its daily snippets of wise sayings about the press, politics, writing, words and whatnot in the fall semester of 1995. The following June, exhausted but exhilarated by a triumphant first season reminding college kids about the First Amendment and the Oxford Comma, the WORD began his annual habit of committing himself to a summer of rest, reflection, recharging and Scrabble at St. Mumbles. 

Since then, the WORD’s, um, “influence” has spread worldwide, far beyond his original few dozen student victims. Last year, the International Bloviaters League and Tribune of Hairbrained Editors & Reporters (IBLaTHER) honored the WORD for a 17th year with its coveted Electronic Junkmail Award. Unauthorized history on the WORD and its storied 22-year tradition is below. Full archives are at tedsword.blogspot.com. 

So the WORD is out again, gentle and unsuspecting readers. Brace yourselves. 

Per tradition, we launch the 23^rd 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. More newspapers died or withered last year than ever. And the state of education, higher or lower, can’t be that great, if current public discourse is any measure. New WORDs begin tomorrow to further confuse a troubled world, and will continue through the November elections and well into 2019, assuming we live that long. Enjoy!

TODAY’S WORD ON JOURNALISM
The Perennial Season Opener. Again.

“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 (1605-1677), 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 with the WORD was to 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 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/enemies/colleagues/ parents/bosses, so that they might be victims as well.
 
When the WORD was trundled by those nice white-jacketed men into St. Mumbles last spring, about 2,000,0000 victims voluntarily or involuntarily 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 folk by so-called “friends.”

• Editorial Comment: And so it continues.

_______

PeezPix

Unhappy Fish

FREE! Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email This free “service” is sent to 2,000,000 or so subscribers around the planet more or less every weekday morning during WORD season. 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. Don’t shoot the messenger.) 
 
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