A Defining Word, by Ricky

People use words to communicate.  In spite of a few of my acquaintances whom never refer to me as a person, person of interest or disinterest, I use words to communicate.  It behooves all people to communicate accurately by using words whose meaning everyone understands.  Those of us who have (or still have at our senior age) a large vocabulary and can actually remember the words when we need them, hold a big advantage over those persons with a limited vocabulary – this category does not include young children whose minds are trans sponge and cis blackholes.  Any parent can testify to the reality of that fact.  Perhaps you can remember a time when you were small or when your young child accurately used or asked for the meaning of a “colorful” word while your mother was standing nearby – words like: shit, cock, fuck, bitch, son-of-a-bitch, gay, lesbian, homo, or pervert.  A child’s vocabulary expands very rapidly indeed.  Especially when following a child’s inquiry, the adult blurts out “Where the hell did you hear that word?”  The answer is nearly always, “From you Daddy.”  At this point, you get a very very stern look from your mother who is still standing nearby.  (Add “hell” to the previous word list.)  By the way, does anyone know why little children seem to delight in saying those words at the most embarrassing time, place, and circumstance?

While growing up from age 10 forward, I spent many hours of my summer vacation from school reading for recreation to pass the time I consumed babysitting my twin brother and sister.  I had many opportunities to interrogate a dictionary to obtain the meaning of a word, if I could not deduce its meaning from the context of the usage.

If I didn’t know how to spell a word in elementary school, my teachers would always tell me to look it up in the dictionary.  I always retorted, “How can I look it up if I don’t know how to spell it?”  I finally quit asking and just tried to figure out a way to write my assignment without using that particular word.

At one time I was a good speller.  I never won the class spelling bee but I was often 2^nd.  When I graduated high school, my ability to spell began to fade away.  Now I depend on my computer’s ability to know what I am trying to communicate and to spell all the words correctly and place them into proper grammatical position.  I’ve discovered that usually the computer and I are both week in the grammar area.

Communicating by pronouncing words correctly (making allowances for regional dialects and not writing a homonym for the correct word) is equally important for presenting a positive image to others along with having your message correctly understood.  Perhaps you can remember President George W. Bush’s mangling of English (some may call it misspeaking or misquoting).  “Dubya” attended some prestigious schools:  Harvard Business School, Yale University, The Kinkaid School, Phillips Academy, and Yale College.  Yet his mangling (there I said it again) of the language does not reflect well on those institutions or upon the Texas education system, which already has major problems of its own.  It goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway) it does not reflect well upon him either.

Words are used to label things and people.  However, labels do not define a thing.  Poorly paraphrasing Shakespeare, labeling a rose a skunk, does not accurately call to mind its sweet smell.  Placing a label on a person does not accurately define who or what that person is like and the danger of mislabeling someone is all too great.  People are too complex to be categorized by a label.  Humans are more than just words.

I am tired of writing on this topic so here is the defining word of the day, “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”.  If you don’t know what it means, look it up in a dictionary or just watch Disney’s “Mary Poppins”.

© 22 Feb 2016 

About the Author 

I was born in June of 1948 in Los Angeles, living first in Lawndale and then in Redondo Beach.  Just prior to turning 8 years old in 1956, I was sent to live with my grandparents on their farm in Isanti County, Minnesota for two years during which time my parents divorced.

When united with my mother and stepfather two years later in 1958, I lived first at Emerald Bay and then at South Lake Tahoe, California, graduating from South Tahoe High School in 1966.  After three tours of duty with the Air Force, I moved to Denver, Colorado where I lived with my wife and four children until her passing away from complications of breast cancer four days after the 9-11-2001 terrorist attack.

I came out as a gay man in the summer of 2010.   I find writing these memories to be therapeutic.

My story blog is: TheTahoeBoy.Blogspot.com 

Passion by Betsy

Passion: an intense desire or enthusiasm for something.

“Passion is energy, feel the  power that comes from focusing on what excites you." — Oprah Winfrey

I have a passion for a few things: First, for certain people; namely, my loved ones—my partner, my children and g-children.

My second passion is for music; namely, classical music of the baroque, classical , and romantic styles and a little contemporary.  I am very limited in my ability to perform music.  I do like being a part of a choral group and have been doing this for much of my life.  But listening is stirring and inspiring and I usually never forget something I have heard that has touched my soul.  I use my ipod  when exercising.  Nothing like a Schubert or Brahms quartet to keep me moving and working hard on the stationary bicycle, elliptical or rowing machine. I do mix in some fast-paced Abba for variety most of which I find very energizing.  My music does excite me and gives me energy. Often fellow exercisers ask me what I'm listening to.  When I tell them, they give me a very strange look as if to say, “Don't you know about rock? You poor thing.”

My greatest passion is for sports. That is doing not watching. I am a less than mediocre spectator fan.   I don’t pay much attention to which teams are winning or losing.  Occasionally, I'll watch a tennis match on TV or even a football game.  But given the opportunity I would a thousand times prefer to play, compete or do most any activity that requires physical action, motion, and either some skill, or a desire for adventure.

My deepest passion?  I had to search my soul a bit for this.  Now in my later years, I have become aware that I have a deep passion for the truth.  Perhaps that is because earlier I spent a good portion of my adult life living a lie.  After all, until I came out, that’s what I was doing. Since we do not know the truth about most things from mundane items that come to us through mainstream media, to metaphysical questions such as what lies beyond this life—since we do not know the truth about these things, I have become very conscientious about separating fact from belief.  Since this is all my brain is capable of at this point, I leave it there.  

I would like to mention one last point about passion in general.

As I was giving this subject further consideration, I came to the conclusion that passion and obsession are very closely related.  To illustrate: I DO NOT have a passion for writing, which does not always come easily. But the use of the English language and the application of its rules of grammar is near and dear to my heart.  This goes back to my high school days when my English teacher Miss Dunn who taught me for all three years of high school English, exposed us to very little literature.  Mostly we studied grammar and a little writing.  Most in the class thought the 3 years of grammar was rather boring, but I loved it.  I guess I have the kind of mind which loves to analyze and that’s what we did.  We analyzed sentences most of the time and learned rules of grammar and word usage.  I, therefore was quite horrified when I realized that I had made a glaring grammatical error in last week’s writing and I actually read it using the wrong part of speech and didn’t even notice.  The realization hit me in the middle of the night—the night following our session here--as I lay in bed. I thought,”Surely I didn’t write it that way.”  So I jumped out of bed at 3:00Am and checked my paper.  Yes, I had written it that way and read it that way.  Very upset with myself, I had to wake Gill up and tell her.  “I can’t believe I did that,” I said.  Later, thinking about passion I decided I do believe I have a passion for properly applying the  rules of  English grammar….Or is it a passion?  Some would call it an obsession.  So, where do we draw the line between passion and obsession? I believe that passion is actually obsession when one says to oneself, “I wish I could have let that go.”  To put it another way.  When one becomes dis-eased over what she THINKS she has a passion for. (Oops! Did anyone notice that!  I just ended a sentence with a preposition.)

© 24 Oct 2014

About the Author

Betsy has been active in the GLBT community including PFLAG, the Denver women’s chorus, OLOC (Old Lesbians Organizing for Change).  She has been retired from the Human Services field for about 15 years.  Since her retirement, her major activities include tennis, camping, traveling, teaching skiing as a volunteer instructor with National Sports Center for the Disabled, and learning.  Betsy came out as a lesbian after 25 years of marriage. She has a close relationship with her three children and enjoys spending time with her four grandchildren.  Betsy says her greatest and most meaningful enjoyment comes from sharing her life with her partner of 25 years, Gillian Edwards.

The Memory of Words Past: Parts of Speech by Phillip Hoyle

This little story could be of interest only to writers or to students of aging. Here’s how it goes.

So at age sixty-four I have just finished writing a novel, a book of over 50,000 words. I have been pondering the future of the manuscript and in so doing decided to ask several people to read it to see if it makes sense, holds together, bores, or entertains. While waiting for their responses, I’m trying to plan creative ways to reread it in an attempt to make sure I will not send a possible agent or publisher a work that seems unpromising. A tactic I learned from my daughter-in-law Heather is to mark all “to be” words, changing them into something active unless they present no alternative. My own idea is to check the use of all, uh, what’s the word? Uh, that kind of word I have sometimes had trouble with. This is awful. Not only do I have trouble selecting the right one of these words; I cannot even think of the name for the type of word. Am I losing my mind? That’s not beyond possibility given my age.

I recall after doing so well in freshman written composition 101 and sophomore and junior ancient Greek, I went for years without naming parts of speech or grammatical stuff even though I was writing on a regular basis. When I entered graduate school I was surprised that I didn’t have facility with that vocabulary anymore. When I heard my professors talking about word use, metaphor, participles, and the like, I realized I’d have to review things I learned in junior high. And now again, after years of writing daily, I cannot think of some simple grammatical concept I studied in Latin, Spanish, Greek, French, and English!

Perhaps I can discover my lost word if I begin writing about words. So I have noun and verb, subject and predicate. I know objects, direct and indirect. There are past and present participles which are verbal adjectives and gerunds which are verbal nouns. Of course I know conjunctions: how could I ever forget PBS’s “Conjunction junction, what’s your function?” But I have forgotten the elusive word that started all this. What is the term for words such as over, under, above, through, and behind? What is the word sometimes connected with places, actions, characters, things, and so forth. I want it to begin with the letter c or p but don’t remember. I do recall how the selection of the correct word has sometimes seemed a challenge. I can misuse them, thus my impulse to have Heather check them in my manuscript, but I can’t ask her to since I don’t recall the word. It would be embarrassing since she teaches writing. I have to get it. Through, beyond, beside and so forth are examples, but I cannot recall the grammatical name.

I had a problem with them in Greek; back then I believe it was because I couldn’t recall the right Greek word that in English often serves as a prefix, for example “meta.” Did it mean through or after? See, it still confuses me. I‘ll work at this and will probably go upstairs to read Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. Surely that old standby will instruct me. Pronouns, personal pronouns, articles, modifier, adjective, adverb…. Still the word I’m searching for doesn’t arise from the grammatical murk of my befuddled brain, but I’ll keep at my memory quest.

The words describe the relative position of things. There it is, finally: position; preposition. I never thought of this, but the word describes its function. It’s the word at the beginning of a phrase (of course, a prepositional phrase) that tells the relative position of the expression it modifies. I was pretty sure I could recall this word, my attempt stimulating the bank of grammatical words and giving synapses time to connect. I like that. Somehow the recollection of this word seems hopeful, as in: I still know what I know; I still have a functioning brain.

A question of an old person: Could loops in the aging sensory and memory system be analogous with (is it ‘to’ or ‘with’?) the proliferation of capillaries in the aging circulatory system? It’s a thought, but I recall I was only twenty-seven years old when I first realized I couldn’t recall such grammatical terms. That really surprised me for I had been out of undergraduate school only four years and worked among college educated middle and upper-middle class folk. In four years, I neither heard nor made in conversation even one reference to grammar! This phenomenon of forgetting terms reminds me of my current need to say the name of a muscle at least once a week or I’ll be unable to find the word when I am trying to explain something to a client. Now that list of terms I memorized in my fifties. Should I find that consoling? But lists of words I memorized in junior high or even earlier and have used for decades? Why should they disappear? Oh well, I’m just happy they are still available, even if my search for them takes me into memories and the like. Someday (soon?) I’ll start forgetting what I’m searching my mind for but hopefully will enjoy tours of my past as I follow loop after loop through my tiring brain. I hope I find my past as entertaining to me as I hope my novel will be to others.

© 23 November 2012

About the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, and socializing. In general he keeps busy with groups of writers and artists. Following thirty-two years in church work and fifteen in a therapeutic massage practice, he now focuses on creating beauty. He volunteers at The Center leading the SAGE program “Telling Your Story.”

He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com