.
Running Amok—The WORD escapes (again),
Defies (still) all reason in a troubled world
ST. GEORGE’S LIGHTHOUSE, California—It had been a quiet
summer on the remote rock that supports the maximum security tower of St.
Mumbles Home for the Terminally Verbose.
Too quiet, as it turns out.
The crash of waves and borking of sea lions in the late-August
pre-dawn calm at the foot of the formidable St. George’s Reef Light, eight
miles off Crescent City, Calif., was suddenly split today by the wail of
sirens.
Yup. For the 19th straight time, Today’s WORD
on Journalism concluded its summer hammocktime by escaping the unescapable
maximum security sanitarium for whackos from the world of words.
“God %^*()(*&^%!!!!!!! No, no no no NO!!” observed St.
Mumbles Director of Syntax Dr. Con Jugate, all in a furious lather not unlike
the seafoam bubbling around the base of the grim tower where the WORD and some
of the worse hard-case cast-offs of America’s newsrooms and journalism
departments have been incarcerated.
According to a thin-lipped report from Jugate’s spokesman,
delivered after the unhappy lexicographer had flung himself into the surf, the WORD
apparently spent the summer on the St. George’s veranda knitting a rubber
Zodiac-style raft, and made a 6-horsepower outboard in the arts and crafts
therapy program.
“No one noticed,” watch commander Mia Opia said as
attendants rescued a burbling sanitarium director from the froth. “He said he
was knitting an afghan for his Twitter editor.”
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 Utah State University.
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 1995 after his 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.
Anyway, the WORD is out again, gentle and unsuspecting
readers. Brace yourselves.
As usual, we launch this season with the ever-useful
wisdom of the genial former 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 2014-2015 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, about 1,800 (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
.jpg)
