she sat under a blanket like a crocus under an april snowfall

While using the awesome-search-function of gmail, I came across these in an email. This is from teaching 8th grade 3 years ago. Brilliant.

Bad Similes

• Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two other sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.
• His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.
• She caught your eye like one of those pointy hook latches that used to dangle from screen doors and would fly up whenever you banged the door open again.
• The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.
• McMurphy fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.
• Her hair glistened in the rain like nose hair after a sneeze.
• Her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the center.
• Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
• He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree.
• The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.
• Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.
• The politician was gone but unnoticed, like the period after the Dr. on a Dr. Pepper can.
• They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan's teeth.
• John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
• The thunder was ominous sounding, much like the sound of a thin sheet of metal being shaken backstage during the storm scene in a play.
• The red brick wall was the color of a brick-red Crayola crayon.
• Even in his last years, Grandpappy had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long it had rusted shut.
• The door had been forced, as forced as the dialogue during the interview portion of "Jeopardy!"
• Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.
• The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.
• He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck either, but a real duck that was actually lame. Maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.
• Her artistic sense was exquisitely refined, like someone who can tell butter from "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter."
• She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
• It came down the stairs looking very much like something no one had ever seen before.
• The knife was as sharp as the tone used by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) in her first several points of parliamentary procedure made to Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) in the House Judiciary Committee hearings on the impeachment of President William Jefferson Clinton.
• The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
• The dandelion swayed in the gentle breeze like an oscillating electric fan set on medium.
• It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.
• He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.
• Her eyes were like limpid pools, only they had forgotten to put in any pH cleanser.
• She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.
• She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.
• Her voice had that tense, grating quality, like a first-generation thermal paper fax machine that needed a band tightened.
• It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.
• Every minute without you feels like 60 seconds.

Several times during the day, Julie goes into me-time, and just sits quietly intently reading books.  Sometimes she entertains herself like this quietly, and sometimes she 'reads' aloud (I've got a video!).  Sometimes she does this for over 30 minutes.  Sometimes she sits on the potty (with or without her pants on) and every once in a while, she gets herself into a tent while reading.  Her love of tents is close to my heart.



This from just 10 minutes ago.

wordle

This is a pretty cool website.

A new teacher at our school showed it to me.

I made this wordle for Garrett's new fitness room:

words-ing this Saturday morning.

Chortle is a fabulous word.

Lewis Carroll created it when he combined the words chuckle and snort. He is a genious. He called his creation a portmonteau, which is a French word for a briefcase with two compartments.

I began reading the introduction of a book I had bought last summer: The Right Word, by Jan Venolia. It's been sitting on my bookshelves here in Prague, and I finally dived into it. I recommend it. I think Carol would like it, and I think Courtney would too. I think it would make an excellent addition to any classroom library. The meat of the book is a dictionary of oft-confused words, misused words, and incorrect words. I'm thinking of creating a spelling curriculum out of it for my 7th and 8th graders. From this book, we can explore:

• origins of words
• evolution of meanings
• homophones
• mixed up words
• meanings of words
• words for informal writing v. words for formal, academic writing
• word play

I think it could be a lot of fun. I was toying with the idea of getting Rebecca Sitton for our school, but I think I won't. She has a lot of great theory, but it's a bit too cutesy for middle schoolers, and it does not tailor itself well enough to students with varying spelling abilities, which of course we have in our international classrooms with many ELL students.

In browsing through through the dictionary, I found her entry on paradigm, which only yesterday I was explaining to my eighth graders. She defines it as "an exhaustive model, example, or pattern." Then she goes on to quote Peter Bowler:

"Never use this word yourself, but be prepared, when it is used by another, to lean forward intently, narrow your eyes and say, 'Just a moment--do you really mean paradigm in that context?' When somewhat bemused, he avers that he does, you merely raise your eyebrows and remain silent. With any luck at all, he will now have forgotten what he was going to say. Apply the same technique when confronted with parameter, infrastructure, structure, and matrix."

This is the sort of advice I believe must be in the training for college professors.

20 volumes of the OED

Petrichor is the scent that rises from pavement after rain has begun to fall. I love that smell. Where did it get a word?

Read this article. Brilliant.


This guy read the entire OED, and then wrote a book about it.

"I have to say, it was absolutely delightful," Shea said. "It was such a moving experience. It felt so similar to reading a great work of literature."

As Shea wrote in Reading the OED, "All of the human emotions and experiences are right there in this dictionary, just as they would be in any fine work of literature. They just happen to be alphabetized."

Part of that appreciation, Shea said, came when words seemed to arrange themselves into strings of poetry or prose.

thanks, carol. i probably stole your thunder. but i couldn't resist posting it myself.

close to home

brilliant.
this 99th post from stuff white people like is too good.

"If a white person were to catch a mistake in The New Yorker, it would be a sufficient reason for a large party."

read it all.

more portmanteaux

• i found an explanation of the word fortnight: it's a portmanteau of fourteen and night.
  

• a goon is a cross between a gorilla and a baboon. that is pretty much little bunny foo foo's favorite animal.
  hmmm....wikipedia does not validate this...though there are many other fun definitions of the word goon. i am tempted to add one more.
  

• so, I don't believe all of these portmanteaux, but there's lots more fun words on this site
  

writing

i went looking for some quotes on writing for class
...this one in particular:

There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.

[which I always thought was said by Hemingway, but apparently erroneously. it's Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith, a famous sportswriter.]


and came across a few that i wanted to share
(some which i might not share with my eighth graders)

Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very;" your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. -Mark Twain

Easy reading is damn hard writing. -Nathaniel Hawthorne

It's not plagiarism - I'm recycling words, as any good environmentally conscious writer would do. -Uniek Swain

I do not like to write - I like to have written. -Gloria Steinem
[substitute the word: run]

I have made this [letter] longer, because I have not had the time to make it shorter. – Blaise Pascal

more from Lewis

I find this bone chilling:

The commonest metaphors would be questioned till some bitter truth had been forced from its hiding place.
"These fiendish German atrocities--"
"But are not fiends a figment of the imagination?"
"Very well, then; these brutal atrocities--"
"But none of the brutes does anything of the kind!"
"Well, what am I to call them?"
"Is it not plain that we must call them simply Human?"

It's from Chapter 9 of Surprised by Joy. Lewis is talking of a tutor whom he described as "near to being a purely logical entity." He would never make small talk or use manners of speaking lightly and boldly questioned anything anyone said.


and on learning a foreign language:

We opened our books at Iliad, Book I. Without a word of introduction, Knock [Lewis's tutor] read aloud the first twenty lines or so.... He then translated, with a few, a very few explanations, about a hundred lines.... When he had finished he handed me over Crusius' Lexicon and, having told me to go through again as much as I could of what he had done, left the room. It seems an odd method of teaching, but it worked. At first I could travel only a very short way along the trail he had blazed, but every day I could travel further. Presently I could travel the whole way. Then I could go a line or two beyond his furthest North. Then it became a kind of game to see how far beyond. He appeared at this stage to value speed more than absolute accuracy. The great gain was that I very soon became able to understand a great deal without (even mentally) translating it; I was beginning to think in Greek. That is the great Rubicon to cross in learning any language. Those in whom the Green word lives only while they are hunting for it in the lexicon, and who then substitute the English word for it, are not reading the Greek at all; they are only solving a puzzle. The very formula, "Naus means a ship," is wrong. Naus and ship both mean a thing, they do not mean on another. Behind Naus, as behind navis or naca, we want to have a picture of a dark, spender mass with sail or oars, climbing the ridges, with no officious English word intruding.

from Lewis

I'm reading C.S. Lewis's Surprised by Joy right now. I like it. I especially like this passage about his father. I find it particularly humorous.

At the same time he [my father] had - when seated in his own armchair after a heavy midday dinner on an August afternoon with all the windows shut - more power of confusing an issue or taking up a fact wrongly than any man I have ever known. As a result it was impossible to drive into his head any of the realities of our school life, after which (nevertheless) he repeatedly inquired. The first and simplest barrier to communication was that, having earnestly asked, he did not "stay for an answer" or forgot it the moment it was uttered. Some facts must have been asked for and told him, on a moderate computation, once a week, and were received by him each time as perfect novelties. But this was the simplest barrier. Far more often he retained something, but something very unlike what you had said. His mind so bubbled over with humor, sentiment, and indignation that, long before he had understood or ever listened to your words, some accidental hint had sent his imagination to work, and he had produced his own version of the facts, and believed that he was getting it from you. As he invariably got proper names wrong (no name seemed to him less probable than another) his textus receptus was often almost unrecognizable. Tell him that a boy called Churchwood had caught a field mouse and kept it as a pet, and a year, or ten years later, he would ask you, "Did you ever hear what became of poor Chickweed who was so afraid of the rats?" For his own version, once adopted, was indelible, and attempts to correct it only produced an incredulous "Hm! Well, that's not the story you used to tell."

...And besides all these confusions, there were the sheer non sequiturs when the ground seemed to open at one's feet. "Did Shakespeare spell his name with an e at the end?"asked my brother. "I believe," said I - but my father interrupted: "I very much doubt if he used the Italian calligraphy at all." A certain church in Belfast has both a Green inscription over the door and a curious tower. "That church is a great landmark," said I, "I can pick it out from all sorts of places - even from the top of Cave Hill." "Such nonsense," said my father, "how could you make out Greek letters three or four miles away?"

One conversation, held several years later, may be recorded as a specimen of these continual cross-purposes. My brother had been speaking of a reunion after dinner for the officers of the Nth Division which he had lately attended. "I supposed your friend Collins was there," said my father.

B. Collins? Oh no. He wasn't in the Nth, you know.
F. (After a pause.) Did these fellows not like Collins then?
B. I don't quite understand. What fellows?
F. The Johnnies that got up the dinner.
B. Oh no, not at all. It was nothing to do with liking or not liking. You see, it was a purely Divisional affair. There'd be no question of asking anyone who hadn't been in the Nth.
F. (After a long pause.) Hm! Well, I'm sure poor Collins was very much hurt.

There are situations in which the very genius of Filial Piety would find it difficult not to let some sign of impatience escape him.

(from Chapter 8 "Release")

word of the day

portmanteau

a word that fuses two or more other words together to give a new meaning.

i.e.:

• wiktionary, my new discovery today, along with this word
• the loathable ginormous (which I would argue needs a hyphen)
• SeaTac
• Alsask (a city on the border of Alberta and Saskatchewan)
  
• and spork

coined by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass.

the little prince,
suspended in my sidebar
is too cute to do away with.

I hope the re-placement of the birds facilitates easier reading.
note: another use for the hyphen is to connect a prefix with a word which would otherwise have a different meaning. hyphens are fun.

etymology

Angie shared some interesting word origins. I did know of Spoonerisms. I like those. But the others were new.


The expression of something being laced with poison is strange. Lace is a pretty delicate thing, and I wonder how it came to be the term for drink poisoned.

This brings me to a Half-handed Cloud song:

Belly, what a waste
And eating all in haste
Not knowing that it's laced
Poison that I can't taste

We hold tasting fees
He's got us where he please
Not seeing where he sees
We're being pulled on skiis

Then save your front door
Not locked, open wide
despite being poor
We're rich as his bride

Danger to us
He fashioned a sail
Took me out of the gale
And so I'm his bride,
But then so is my wife
And daily to abide
He keeps us on the ride

(i can't always tell if i'm hearing the lyrics right. i sure wish he'd post them on a website.)

The next simple song is so good too:

Parent-free I will not leave you
Children rest secure
I'll send the Comforter
Out -ooo oo

verbifying

Who woulda thunk?

In his book "Word Spy," Paul McFedries writes that Google's attorneys send journalists who use google as a verb a stern letter that cites examples of appropriate ("I used Google to check out that guy I met at the party") and inappropriate ("I googled that hottie") uses.

but the NYTimes article continues:

It's beyond obvious that Google's lawyers are fighting a losing battle. And they should relax. Not only is "I googled that hottie" great publicity for the company, but it's fresh and funny and an excellent example of how anthimeria gives English an invigorating slap upside the head. At this very moment, the language is being regenerated with phrases like my bad, verbs like dumb down and weird out...

by Ben Yagoda who wrote a book that I think might be interesting: If You Catch an Adjective, Kill It: The Parts of Speech, for Better and/or Worse.

punctuation

ah, the English teacher in me finds great satisfaction in finding someone else who finds apostrophe errors atrocious.

Apostrophe Abuse blog

I saw this in a Holiday Inn: Womens Restroom. What in the heck?

And this was on a bumper sticker the other day:

Somewhere in Texas a village is missing its' idiot.

Really?

And then I saw this in a bio:

I graduated with Honor's.

egad.

looking for words

I think there ought to be a word for when academic writers make up a word for their own purpose: a word that is totally unnecessary and could easily be replaced by a word in common usage. (Preferably a word that I could yell at the book every time the unnecessary one was used.)

I think there also ought to be one plural word for neices and nephews. That's a ridiculous mouthful. I trip over it every time.


Betsy got me thinking about words that English ought to have. She got published in The Atlantic: "I need a word for the very vulnerable moment when, to pass through airport security, I must re­move my shoes. This is the great equalizer: in sock feet, no one is dignified."


http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/fugitives/fugitives.htm




There also ought to be a word for when I should be grading, but I'm blogging........I don't like the sound of procrastination.

english

A woman: without her man is nothing.

A woman without her man is nothing.

A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.

I saw this on car chock full of bumber stickers and I was inching forward, trying to read them all. The image it produced in my mind made me laugh out loud. Then it reminded me of the above sentences in Lynn Truss's grammar book Eats Shoots and Leaves.

Chock full is a strange expression. Am I spelling it right? I wonder where it comes from. In the past 2 weeks 2 people have said to me "take a gander" and I have never heard that before. I told my students that and some of them thought that was funny. Then I proceeded to ask them to take Dylan's "Talking John Birch Paranoid Blues" with a grain of salt, and they didn't know what I meant. I would like to know the etymology of all those phrases.

grammar

Grammar Review
Punctuation: Semicolon, Colon, Hyphen, Dash

Edit these sentences using the above punctuation. Note that some sentences might be fixed in different ways: do what you think is best, but leave each sentence as one sentence.

1. I intend to bring four things for the party, napkins, plates, drinks and cups.
2. Amy will I certainly hope remember to bring the cake.
3. Betsy said she would bring a vegetable tray, Christy will bring the dip.
4. There are a lot of things to do for a person turning twenty eight.
5. A party for a four year old might not be so complicated.
6. Nathan arranged for the clown, bought large, red balloons, picked up the presents, cards, and prizes, and sent invitations to friends in Ashville, North Carolina.
7. Next year we won’t plan something so big this is getting ridiculous.
8. Courtney will be surprised she thought we forgot.

for Carol

It's 12:23 on a Friday night, but I'm all wound up from a good conversation with dear Courtney, and I decided I'm not going to bed. It's still my vacation, and I have nowhere to be tomorrow morning, so I can stay up late into the night, typing away my thoughts. and I have a blog that needs to be written on.

many things have been flying through my head lately. many new things that I've been trying to wrap my brain around. (or am I trying to wrap them around my brain?) You might say there was a paradigm shift going on. Paradigm is my new word, and I will try to explain what it means, for as Charlotte Mason would say, if you can explain something - or retell it back - then you really know it. A paradigm is like a way of seeing something. It is the way you think something should be. So, for example, you could have a paradigm of how school is. Then the paradigm would include everything you know about school. Anything new that you learned about school would either fit into that paradigm and just add to it, or it might contradict your current paradigm and cause what is called a paradigm shift. And that is when my brain hurts, and I close my eyes halfway and try to make sense of something. (How was that, Courtney?) So, for another example, that is what happened when my sister told me she was going to have a baby. ! I first took in the news as one does. I heard it and my brain processed it, but it didn't fit in with my paradigm of my sister to be pregnant or to be a mother, and it took a while before I was able to wrap my brain around the notion. and now I get it, and it sure is exciting!

I'm on vacation, and have been at my parents' house where the internet connection is slow even for a dial-up and so I haven't checked my email. I haven't checked it in so long, and I'm rather enjoying this not-checking-it and so even though I'm back home, I'm still avoiding it, because I can. Part of the problem is that I have a growing list of people who I would like to email--that is, write a serious nice long email to. But I haven't done it yet, and in order to do it, I'd have to open my email and then I'd see a huge chunk of unread mail, and I'd feel like I have to respond to it all, and I'd see that some of it could be taken care of real-quick, and I should just deal with it, but then I'd be in a business-task sort of mood, and that is not a good letter-writing sort of mood, and so, the cycle continues. The emails haven't been written, the emails haven't been read. But it feels good to throw it all off along with other unvacationlike tasks. Like going to bed at normal hours.

Last night we played a fun game of naming all the things that were different from this time last year. Especially things that happened or changed that were unexpected. That was fun. That led us to wondering what unexpected things will happen this year, 2006.

most common homophone mix up of late: led and lead.

• lead is what you don't want in your paint.
• led is what leaders did yesterday.

I am sure unexpected things will be happening. most sure. Because that is what my paradigm of the future tells me.
I'm not sure if I'm making sense any more, so I won't try to use any more new words until I've fully synthesized them into my vocabulary.

But here is what I really have been thinking about lately. I've been thinking about this summer, and I've got some big ideas. I say ideas, and not plans, because I no commitments to them, and I'm afraid to say they will happen, because then I will be disappointed in myself if they don't happen. For now, the planning of it is fun.

The plan is to take a huge road trip around the country. I would start off about midJune and head west. Hopefully I'd make a stop in Kansas City to see Kailin, then I'd spend several days in Dallas with the Polaks. Then, I'd take off for the Grand Canyon, and this is where I hope some others would love to join me. I'd see the Grand Canyon, and then head for California, and then travel all the way up the coast through California, Oregon and Washington to Seattle. I'd spend some time with David and Jodi, who hopefully would be living there by then, and also with cousins on Vashon Island (where my bike was built! which would come with me). This would be about early July, and I'd go up to Vancouver to spend some time on the 40 acres, with, hopefully, a great deal of family. Then, with Rachel my cousin, we would head off across America, hitting all the great sites like the Badlands, Yellowstone, Mt Rushmore. maybe I'd leave a bit for another time. I'd drop her off in Chicago, and head back to Atlanta, to rest up and start school. So that's the plan. And then there is all the fun other details to imagine, like how I would fund it, and how I would pack my car (which I hope will be christened by then), and what I'd need to get, like a bike rack and a sleeping bag and tent. And who else will join me, and could this really happen?

This all started one morning when I was getting ready for school and it just popped into my brain. Isn't that odd.

Isn't this odd stuff that you get from me at 12:58am?
Probably why I don't do this that often.

Right now I can piece together where my writing is coming from - I think I could list about 5 authors at least that are influencing my writing. Or perhaps I could at least I could think of book titles if not the writers. Which is ok. I wonder if that is because I'm tired and I am writing like that, or if I always do that, and just now I happen to be able to see it like that. Actually, no, I know I write like that a lot, especially after having just finished a particularly well written book. Like Huckleberry Finn, or The Education of Little Tree, or...If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.... I think this entry just happens to be a whole lot more piecemeal that others.


Ha ha, I just realized something funny. When Carol read the sentence from the introduction to Plato containing paradigm in it, I couldn't explain it. Then when she read her understanding of the dictionary definition of paradigm to me, it didn't fit with the vague idea I had of the word, or the contexts in which I had seen the word. So I was really confused (the fact that Radu purposely misused the word the rest of the evening probably added to it). So it was like my brain was trying to shift my understanding of the word and recall all the other times I have heard it and understood those passages. And it wasn't working. But now it is: Courtney's Clarification has helped greatly. [That sort of connects to the idea of what a paradigm is, doesn't it?] It's sort of like the ideas of schema. Now who was that educator that talked about schema, and fitting new things into it, and reworking it? and the more you know the more you can add to it? It is far too late for me to remember something like that.

There now, I've given you all lots of opportunities to respond to things from this blog, and so I hope you will, if you actually have read this far. Which I'm glad if you have.

I hope your Christmases were all Merry and may you have a wonderful last day in 2005!