SEASON 27! Who *Is* That Masked WORD?

Today’s WORD on Journalism

Year 27 Begins — Afflicting the comfortable since 1995

Friday, Sept. 17, 2021 

Veteran WORDsters will recognize this for what it is — the annual return, like cicada noise, of a plague on the world community's peace and quiet.

That’s right. We have been notified by a relieved staff at the world-famous St. Mumbles Home for the Terminally Verbose (Motto: “Please Shut Up!”) that the WORD arose from his hammock this morning, unrecognizable behind several multicolored N95 masks, and boarded the sanitarium shuttle.

"I couldn't really understand him, what with all those masks," said retired copy editor (aren't they all?) Juan "Les" Comma, "but I think he said, 'Well, crap. Somebody's got to do it.'"

It's the latest start of a WORD season ever, which had prompted rumors that the WORD had shriveled up and died in his luxury padded cell rather than return to face an increasingly cognitively impaired planet. "Nope," the WORD mumbled, "it's no time for the fainthearted. Monster storms, drought, MAGAs, wildfires, that wingnut congresswoman from Georgia, Delta, Tucker Carlson and other pestilences . . . the place is a wreck. My peeps need me."

Besides, today is Constitution Day. "Right-minded folk have to step up and reclaim their Constitution and participatory democracy," he said, evidence that St. Mumbles treatments had done little to reduce his verbosity. "Nope. I still gots my words."

Whoo boy. Brace yourselves.

~ • ~ • ~ • ~

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

~ • ~ • ~ • ~ 

 

 

 

 

The WORD’s Back-story: The WORD was originally concocted (“conceived” is, I think we all agree, altogether too biological) as a way to get beginning journalism students to pay attention to their email. Strange as it may sound, email was only 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 to David Carr.
 
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, its thousands of victims, voluntarily or involuntarily subscribing to the direct email WORD, sighed wth relief. Many more seek out the WORD by checking the website (tedsword.blogspot.com/), whence it is linked and Tweeted and forwarded like a pox to many more unsuspecting folk by so-called “friends.”
  

• Editorial Comment: Fasten your seatbelts, kids. It’s going to be another bumpy ride.

~ • ~ • ~ • ~

FREE! Get TODAY'S WORD ON JOURNALISM in your email This free “service” is sent weekdays to misguided 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: Don’t shoot the messenger. I just quote ’em, I don’t necessarily endorse ’em.)  

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

_____________
Edward C. Pease, Ph.D.
Professor & Department Head Emeritus
Department of Journalism & Communication
Utah State University
Today's WORD on Journalism