Words & Language: January 2005 Archives

A co-worker named Larry had a box in his office yesterday for an item that his wife wished to return. It was some sort of "cropping station table" that people use in their pursuit of scrapbooking.

We were both amused by one of the bullet points on the box.

So in a huge font it says.

Infinitly adjustable to ANY height

But in wee letters it adds, Between 20" and 40".

1. I love the spelling of "infinitly"
2. I love the fact that this thing can be adjusted to ANY height as long as it's between the minimum and maximum. By that logic my height is infinitely adjustable between 5' and 5' 10", depending on my slouch.

I should have some fine print tattooed somewhere on my body disclaiming anything that I might have said.

I think I've pointed out the blog Seraphic Secret before. Many of the entries deal with the death of Robert and Karen's son, Ariel. His writing about grief is so real and so human; you can't help but feel his loss when you read his posts. Here is an excerpt from a recent post.

I have always struggled with people who have all the answers. I was raised in a church where they had all the answers, direct from God. Turns out they were asking the wrong questions and mistaking their own wishful thinking for the voice of God. (I've come to think we all do this from time to time, it's just a matter of degrees.)

I heard all the trite answers about death growing up; "God had a reason" or "It was for the best" or "They didn't have enough faith." I always rebelled against these answers. I never wanted to believe in that monstrous God.

When I was in fifth or sixth grade my pastor died. My family was quite close to the pastor and his family. We were over at their house all the time. He was 29 or 30 at most. He had two small children, the oldest was five I think. The younger child sat next to me at the funeral and doodled in a coloring book. At one point during the service he looked right at me and asked, "Why is my daddy in that box." Even then I knew there was no good answer and I just shook my head and said "I don't know why your dad is in the box."

To this day, I still want to believe that his dad wasn't in the box. More than once I have been somewhere and saw someone who reminds me of Pete. In my heart, I still want it to be Pete instead of someone with his curly red hair and swagger. I've wanted him to shake my hand and tell me he had to be in some government witness protection program. I've always wanted to believe he was still alive somewhere.

I think the best we can hope in life, is not answers to all of life's questions but simply having people in our life to hold us when we ask them.

I ran into this essay by Jonathan Franzen, The Comfort Zone which I really enjoyed. His riffs on the joys of the old Charlie Brown comic strips really brought me back to a time in my childhood where I was reading the same old Charlie Brown collections. This sentence in particular stuck out as it reminded me of how I felt at the same age.

I finished reading the article before realizing that the author was the same as "The Corrections" which I read and enjoyed last year.

The internet is great, there are dictionaries, quotation collections, encyclopedias and a host of other archives. However, I haven't found the one thing I'm looking for, a collection of phrases that are cliché.

"What about me" Amy suggested my blog might form the basis of such a collection. While I appreciate the encouragement, I don't think my blog is definitive enough to qualify.

Folksonomy

This is a great new word, obviously related to the word taxonomy. It is a way to describe the natural way people classify things when given the opportunity to assign keywords and very little feedback. This blog for instance uses categories for posting. Those categories exist in a flat namespace without hierarchy. Some of the categories are very descriptive, like "Movies to see" while others are hodge-podge like "Current Events" which is meaningless a few days after it is written. Yet, mostly it works, for fun examples see web services like flickr and del.icio.us the current darlings of the blogging set.

These words really intrigue me. Periodically, I have moments where I feel all alone, as if there isn't another person on this planet who is affected by life in the ways that I am or that my actions and reactions to life are unique to me and my peculiar set of defects

It's a kind of vanity to believe that I'm so original either in my faults or virtues. When I discover how very ordinary either my vices or virtues are, it's both a relief and a bit of a let down.

At dinner recently, my bride was talking to the children about a Panda we had seen at the San Diego Zoo a number of years ago. When told that the Panda looked sad, the children wondered why the Panda looked sad. My wife theorized that it might be because the Panda was so far from home, or that there were too many people staring at it.

I said, "I know why the Panda is sad, it doesn't like people anthropomorphizing it."

To my knowledge, it was my first off-the-cuff recursive joke.