Fun with Words

 General  Comments Off on Fun with Words
Aug 272010
 

The Artist was out front with the weed whacker, clearing up the overgrowth along the driveway. Duchess didn’t know what to make of it. She crouched on the back of the couch, watching him out the front window. When he moved to the side of the house, she ran over to the side door to watch from there.

The Director strolled by and attempted to pet her. She jumped about a foot and scooted out of reach.

“She’s all discombobulated,” I told him.

Seems he’d never heard that word before. “What’s combobulated?” he asked, laughing.

“It’s discombobulated,” I clarified, “I don’t believe combobulated is a word. It means she’s confused and disoriented. The Artist has the weed whacker out and it’s freaking her a little bit.”

“I guess that’s one of those words that always has dis in front of it,” he said.

“Yep. Kind of like I’ve never heard of anyone being gruntled.”

He was giggling for five minutes over that one.

Grammar Nazi

 General  Comments Off on Grammar Nazi
Aug 202010
 

When I’ve got all the bookkeeping-type work caught up, I go see if the office manager needs help with any of hers. She frequently does. In addition to general office administration, she makes updates to the website, authors the church’s monthly newsletter, writes the weekly Sunday bulletin, and a host of other tasks.

The second week I was there she asked if I would mind looking over the Sunday bulletin, just so there would be a second set of eyes checking it for typos and errors.

Ten minutes later, I returned it with several little red marks—a couple of typos, a grammatical error or two, and one paragraph that I simply thought was worded awkwardly and offered a suggestion for improvement.

“I was an English major my first trip through college,” I cautioned her. “Never give me something to proofread unless you actually want it, you know, proofed.”

She was delighted. It’s not like she has a lot of mistakes, she just needed someone else to give it a once-over, and the associate pastor is frequently too busy to do it before it has to be printed. Now I’m proofing the bulletin practically every week.

It’s nice having a job that lets you use more than one skillset.

Back in School

 General  Comments Off on Back in School
Aug 172010
 

High school starts next week, but college started yesterday. I’ve already done one assignment for my accounting class.

I also signed up for a basic history class, covering “western civilization.” I chose this class for several reasons:

  • Ideally I plan to keep going to school as long as I have time and money to do so. A lot of the higher-level classes require the same first-year classes, like history, English comp, and basic algebra. I’ve already taken quite a few of those basics, might as well take the rest.
  • It looked interesting, and I was afraid I wasn’t getting into my accounting class so I wanted to take something.
  • All of my close friends and relatives are very smart people who can converse intelligently on things like history and world events. My history is quite weak and I can’t really participate. I plan to remedy this so I no longer feel like a fucking moron.

Our instructor is an energetic, self-assured Italian man who paces the front of the room and talks with his hands. He spent the first class going over the syllabus (this is apparently required, all teachers do it the first day) in between anecdotes about prior students and warning us about the dire consequences of plagiarism, failure to study, or not showing up on test day. He referred to himself several times as a “benign dictator.”

I like him already. This is going to be a fun class.

 Older Entries  Newer Entries
Bear