on the words we use ...

the students in the professional school where i teach razzed me a lot last year about how punctilious i can be about the words we use.

be forewarned: the sound you will hear for the next 14 weeks will be the same broken record. only louder this time because i feel slightly more emboldened to run my mouth.

today, at our new student orientation, the dean of our college came in to make an appearance and welcome the first year students.

i made some notes on his remarks. here is what i wrote on my external hard drive (that is, the small bright green notebook i wear on a beaded chain) ...

BIG
LONG
EXPENSIVE
OLD

• he went on about how we are such a big institution ... (true enough 40,000 students, 20,000 faculty and staff).
• we have been rated the biggest (harvard and umich competed for the biggest through the course of the 20th century) and high up on lists of institutions with grad schools for a long time...(now ranked 11th internationally).
• we have a lot of money...(big endowment, big bucks, big everything) and oh...incidentally, it costs a lot of money to come here.
• and this year we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of the college.

i was apoplectic.
i was about to spit.
i showed my notebook to the woman who mentors me and she rolled her eyes and made a gesture that was both knowing and tired because she has dealt with him for a long time.

so the dean left.

and my chairperson looked out across the room and summoned me to the front: "kelly quinn looks like she has something to say". so i scrambled to the front and feigned like i needed to read from my notes on the external hard drive:

i began: we are indeed: BIG LONG EXPENSIVE and OLD.

and i continued that we could also teach them how to make small courteous gestures, ones that offered dignity and decency on very small budgets. i explained that i believed in social intercourse and public communion and we don't always need to be BIG, LONG, EXPENSIVE and OLD to make a difference in peoples' lives. and that as an historian i was always looking for ways to animate public spaces with small details and acts.

and that i loved storytelling and that i went to puppet camp this summer and i hoped that everyone would take a class with me to learn how to be small short cheap and young.

in other news, joe biden is no one's hope. i know donna you might be fond of his son because you lived with him, but the father is a doofus. when asked about how he was faring stumping in south carolina, whether it was hard for him as a northeastern liberal, he basically sang a little diddy, "lalalala my people owned more slaves than your people"...so there. it was yucky and dumb and crazy. but he didn't use the word macaca.

and in still other news...
bunderbate wrote me a note today in which she observed (and i agreed) j!s!s! is the funniest. but his comments on my blog smell a little tiny bit like the cry for help that was his 700+ paged dissertation.

and even more news...
tomorrow shelley, karen and twig are coming to town to hang out.