The Daily Dose

Today, I have a great urge to write The Daily Dose of the Good (and Not So Good) Words, but my purpose for writing, beyond wanting to write something to sustain, sooth and/or shake my faithful readers- most of which are spambots, though a convincing case could be made that they do not really read The Daily Dose and thus should not be counted as part of my readership, and yes, I know, I have mentioned this fact before; I’ll just warn you now, I am known to be obsessional, so I will probably say it again and again- my purpose in writing is uncertain. Today, I find my way word by word, which makes it appear to be a linear process. While the linear does play a role in how the words are laid down, how they line up, how you read and evaluate them, writing, my writing, seldom is straightforward.

Today, I want to share with y’all just how much I love words and their all kissing cousins- sentences, paragraphs, essays, stories, plays, songs, poems, novels, novellas, scripts, dialogues, monologues, banter, quips, jokes, puns, riddles, limericks, bawdry, schpiels, rants, sermons, speeches, etc and so forth. I love “take no prisoners” words; precision words that would shoot the cliche I just used on sight as they shear themselves of any padding to get to the point. I love overblown floozies that flop all over the page, spreading their legs wanton, crass invitation. I love serious, bookish, quiet words. I love silly, loud, common words. I love words that lay down an argument; that build a case letter by letter. I love words that sink their claws into the body of an idea, rending its flesh, snapping its spine, breaking its bones, so we can suck out the marrow. Despite the writers’ adage “show don’t tell,” I’ll gladly listen when words tell me something, though I also like it when they show me a good time.

I love spoken words. I love written words. I love the subtle and shifting differences between the spoken and the written. I love the ways that repetition and fillers amplify spoken words in interesting, necessary ways. I love the way that those same devices must be used sparingly when writing words, unless deliberately trying to mimic speech. My attempts at writing Southern Hyperbole (a specific rhetorical style that should, as far as I am concerned, have its own Wikipedia entry ) plays with the ornate, dramatic, tangential, digressive patterns of Southern speech, but it is not quite the same when written instead of spoken. There are differences. I love those differences.

I love the words unsaid, the ones on the tip of my tongue, the ones held in cheek in check. I love words stuttering and stumbling, unable to explain, inadequate to express. I love babbling words, never stopping streams that overflow every available channel, breaking dams, subverting lexaducts designed and dug to move all those water like words in an efficient and effortless streamline of meaning. I like trash heaps of words, junkyards of broken down scraps and parts and potentials. I love the wrong words at the wrong time. I love muddy words that track dirt all over a page, staining and constraining that page’s bright white possibilities.

You may wonder what the hell all this lexaphillia has to do with my mission to save the whole wide world and little old you. All these words about words are an extravagance; a kind of hedonism that in my role as your spiritual advisor I heartily recommend to you. Some religions advise moderation, suggest that you walk the middle path. I find I only walk the middle path on my way between one extreme or the other. I aim for it, but I always overshoot, and so my sojourns in the middle never last long because my momentum always carrying me past it. So I embrace my extremes, my extravagances- at least the ones that cause little harm to others. Lavishly, foolishly, earnestly, over-the-top-ly loving words is not a walk down the middle path, though it can be spiritual (though let me assure my faithful atheist followers that it doesn’t have to be).

Today, I wear my heart on my sleeve as an offering. My love of words pushes me to the edge of words, asks me to sacrifice no small amount of words as I attempt to find the words for my love of words. And because I can find no other satisfying way to summarize the ragtag bunch of words, I’ll let these last words have the last word.

Tonight, I cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye promise me, myself and I (and you, too) that I will spend less than 45 minutes writing (and editing) this off the cuff dose of The Daily Dose of the Good (and Not So Good) Words.

The reason for this obsession with time is that I am trying to create a sustainable practice of writing a dose every day, thus finally living up to hype of the name. The problem is that I’ll start writing and next thing I know hours have passed, and I have produced the passable prose that I pass on to you. This wouldn’t be a big deal ‘cept spreading the Good (and Not So Good) Words is not a profitable enterprise, and I am more than a little conflicted about any moves to make it profitable. I have to have time to earn my bread and butter, do my chores at The Bishop Family Compound, experience life (my own and others’, vicariously) and do enough reading and research to have something semi interesting-useful-entertaining to say.

Since I’ve given The Daily Dose its very own spot on the web in the form of an elegant Word Press blog on my still needs much improving website, it seems only the Spambots are “reading” the Good (and Not So Good) Words. This can be a mite discouraging. But I count my work on any particular Daily Dose worth it if only one person reads it and finds some small scrap of something to savor. That said, I salt my romantic idealism with more than a pinch of pragmatism. I want my time to be well spent. I know the spambots will love them no matter what. Some Daily Doses are marathons and take a long, long time to write (regardless of how long they take to read) and some are wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am’s.

The utopian vision that is seen but never quite reached is an important part of any dream worth its salt (I seem to be obsessed with the saline, though right now that isn’t a salient point). Sometimes, we let the pie in the sky fly in our eye, blinding us to the small tweaks and compromises we could make to make it (whatever it is) realizable. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Between the marathon and the quickie, I might find a Middle Path for most of these (e)Missionary missives.

And so I will continue to aspire. And so should you.

(Unless you are a spambot programmer, then you need to stop aspiring so much. I won’t mind the loss in my readership. Not one little bit).

Today, The (not quite) Daily Dose of the Good (and Not So Good) Words is, oddly enough, about words, specifically one word. Any student of scripture (scripture broadly defined) worth her salt is going to examine closely how words are used (and abused). I am as salty as the Dead Sea when exploring a word’s buoyancy.

Today, I embark on a pragmatic study of the word shed. The old saw “context is everything” will be our watch words as we drop “shed,” as used in two articles in today’s edition of The New York Times, into the English channel to see if it sinks or floats.

“A child can shed flu virus for 10 days, Dr. Imperato said, an adult for 5.” Donald McNeil, Jr., Containing Flu, Is Not Feasible, Specialist Say.

“Mr. Pestronk’s group estimates that local health departments lost about $300 million in financing and 7,000 workers in 2008, a year when more than half of all agencies shed employees.” Kevin Sack, Local Health Agencies, Hurt by Cuts, Brace for Flu.

My first impulse, due to reading one article right after the other, was to be slightly miffed as associative leaps lead me to the conclusion that this writer thinks of employees as an infectious disease spread by sick health agencies’ sneezes and wheezes, which other business can avoid catching if they take preventative measures. While this may (or may not) be a flight of fancy, there is something about this use of the word that is important. So let’s dig a little deeper.

Are writers, tired of the more commonplace words for job loss- firings, fired, termination, terminations, terminated, layoffs, losing your job- and barred from slang- canned, shown the door, given a pink slip, axed, getting your walking papers, sacked (ironic that the author’s last name is slang for to fire)-, stretching their vocabulary muscles? Should we applaud Kevin Sack for using the thesaurus to bring out an oldy but goody?

Two quick Google searches reveal that shed and shedding as euphemisms for layoffs and firings have shed all over the internet. Google turned up 321,000 instances of “shedding jobs” and 7,960,000 of “shed jobs.” All those sheds are kindling for an awesome (in the old time religion sense of that word) funeral pyre of lost jobs and dashed hopes. Ironically, this Daily Dose will put more sheds on fire.

This shedding of the word shed got me to thinking about the meaning of the word shed and why it might be used to talk about firing people. Shed is a powerful little verb. It means to part or divide, to pour or make flow (as in bloodshed), to radiate or cast/give off, to allow to flow or fall (as in shedding tears) and the less emotive, more passive to let fall or be divested of.

Bloodshed and tears may be the result of some of this casting off of employees, but looking back at the parallel use of shed for an infectious child spreading the possibly pandemic swine flu might shed some light on why shed is being used by Sack and so many other writers. In both sentences the use of shed makes the subjects less responsible for what is shed. The sick child does not mean to be infectious; the health agencies did not want to cut their staffs. In both cases there the use of the word shed implies forces beyond the subjects’ control acting on and through them.

“The economy made them do it” is the excuse hidden out back, behind the shed. I understand why writers shield their subjects from blame by building sheds of sheds. But it diverts us from looking closely at what is happening. Yes, often the angry gods of the economy demand sacrifices. The throats of hundreds of thousands of jobs are cut each month. The Labor Department’s Employment Situation Summary reported that 663,000 jobs were lost this past March.

Yet, the excuse of forces beyond our control, this shed of shed, is a faulty construction. Employers are to blame for firing so many people, regardless of why they made that decision. They are not the only ones to blame, but they must be made to bear some of the responsibility for these firings. As businesses and governments shed jobs like a dog shedding its winter coat, we must not let their excuse of the “economy made us do it” blind the rest of us to the unnecessary firings, the ways that particular choices of which jobs to cut exacerbate existing inequalities and how the economic crisis is used as a feint to cover flagrant abuses of power and sheer stupidity.

Did that corporation really need to fire so many people or could it have cut its lobbying budget? Why did that university president get a $200,000 plus bonus when whole departments with tenured faculty were axed, and will he get another one this year when even more jobs will be “shed” by the university? Why aren’t more in upper management losing their jobs? Keeping in mind that payroll generally is any organization’s largest expense, could state governments and local businesses find other ways to tighten their budgetary belts? If asked, will employees agree to a voluntary per cent cut in their pay so that everyone can keep their jobs? Have our state and federal senators and representatives cut their own pay? Why the hell did presidential staff spend $35,000 dollars on a photo- op that scared the bejesus out of people in New York?

Writers’ sheds protect business from scrutiny at the time when we most need to look closely. Let’s shed the sheds (at least in this context), cast them off and let them sink deep in our sea of words.