Category: Communication
This Blog Post is Okay
Okay, so over the past few weeks, I haven’t been very active in this space. I’ve been posting sporadically and haven’t been regularly visiting the many other wonderful blogs I normally visit regularly. I apologize for that and I will be working to make the rounds again now in the coming days as summer begins.
The last many weeks have been busy ones for me as I took on the full-time coverage for the maternity leave of a high school English teacher. Though it’s been a blast, it has also taken a lot of time and energy and I’ve had to let some things slide. But now the final exams have nearly all been given and the grades are almost submitted, and much like eighth president of the United States Martin Van Buren, I’m OK.
Van Buren was only a candidate for the presidency when, in 1840, he first became known as “Old Kinderhook,” because he was from Kinderhook, New York. His supporters across the nation formed OK clubs and many historians assumed that this is how the ubiquitous little acronym OK, and the word “okay,” that it spawned, was born.
In truth, the Van Buren campaign may have influenced the persistence of the word, but that’s not where it started. Twenty-eighth president Woodrow Wilson was convinced the word had Native American roots, coming from the Choctaw word okeh, first borrowed by seventh president Andrew Jackson.
That explanation sure sounds okay, but it turns out it wasn’t right either. Neither were the assumptions made by various other o. k. linguists and who knows how many okay American presidents that the word descended from Latin, Greek, Swedish, or Mandingo.
It wasn’t until the more than ok work of word historian Allen Walker Read in 1963 that the world learned the story of its favorite word, a word that is understood in nearly every language in the world. Read explained in the magazine American Speech that o.k. was first used in 1839 as an abbreviation for “all correct” by an editor for the Boston Morning Post, and was meant as a friendly poke at a colleague at the Providence Journal in Providence, Rhode Island.
To modern readers that story probably sounds a little strange, but Read explained that at the time, there was a brief craze in English over both abbreviations and intentional misspellings. Well, ok.
And really, if you consider the modern teenager, with whom I’ve recently spent a great deal of time, it’s not so hard to imagine written communication carried out almost entirely in acronyms and misspelled words. Also, I think we can trust Allen Walker Read, as he is also the man who presented the world with a thorough understanding of the origin of the F_ _ _ word. But that’s another blog post.
The origin of ok or o.k. or OK or okay certainly doesn’t make for a glamorous story, but then maybe that’s appropriate. The really curious thing, I think, is how it managed to work its way into the speech of so many various cultures. I somehow doubt that it was all due to the influence of Martin Van Buren.
Perhaps the word has just evolved because as a species, we humans don’t always have something all that brilliant or important to say and so we end up saying things that are just ok. All I do know is that whatever corner of the world you’re from, you probably know what I mean when I say it. And that’s okay with me.
The Naked Truth About Pirates
In April of 1716, the crew of the French vessel Ste. Marie got a strange and probably pretty scary surprise. Off the coast of Cuba, the ship, carrying at least 30,000 pieces of eight, was flanked by two small vessels full of pirates who were armed to the teeth and were otherwise as naked as the day they were born.
It had been eight months or so since eleven of twelve Spanish ships transporting a large haul of treasure from the New World to the old had fallen victim to a hurricane and wrecked off the coast of Florida. The tragedy claimed as many as 1,500 lives and quickly attracted the attention of treasure hunters, including partners Paulsgrave Williams and Samuel Bellamy who sailed from Cape Cod, arriving in the fall after much of the treasure had already been plundered.
Of the two, Bellamy was the experienced sailor and the historical rumor mill suggests that he had a pretty good reason for needing that treasure. He had met the girl of his dreams but her father refused the poor young man’s plea to marry his daughter. Frustrated at the lack of treasure, Bellamy, who would later come to be known as Black Sam, turned to piracy because, obviously, it’s every father’s dream for his daughter to marry a pirate.
And he was a really good pirate, actually one of the most successful of the Golden Age of Piracy despite a relatively short run. He often shared his ill-gotten wealth with those who needed it most, earning a reputation as the Robinhood of pirates. A brilliant strategist, he went out of his way to minimize violence, even stripping to the buff in order to shock the crew and take the Ste. Marie without a single shot fired.
And despite his nakedness, he allegedly treated his captives with respect, preferring “Please and thank you, sirs” to “Arrr. Walk the plank, ye black-hearted bilge rats!” That may be something to bear in mind as we celebrate Talk Like a Pirate Day coming up this Sunday, September 19th.
You will be celebrating Talk Like a Pirate Day, yes? Among all the thousands of ridiculous made-up holidays and “official” recognition days that have been crowded onto our calendars over the years, this one is definitely on my short list of favorites (Pi Day on March 14 claims the top spot).
Originally created by some guy in Oregon as a way to pillage some fun on the date of his ex-wife’s birthday, the probably-not-so-celebration-worthy event attracted notice when humor columnist Dave Barry wrote about it in 2002. So now, people in the know, spend the day calling one another scurvy dogs and saying Yo ho ho a lot.
And why not? Historians may argue that outside of Disney movies pirates probably didn’t actually talk all that differently than the rest of us, but it’s kind of a fun challenge to try to work shiver me timbers into a conversation. Go ahead and give it a try; talk like a pirate. Just maybe think twice before dressing like one.
The Title of this Post has Been Censored
In March of 1919, noted socialist activist Kate Richard O’Hare, fresh from the Missouri State Penitentiary where she had been briefly imprisoned for interfering with military recruitment through her anti-war speech, arrived in Des Moines, Iowa where she was scheduled to speak at the public library auditorium.
There she was denied the right to present by city librarian Forrest Spaulding who claimed the auditorium had been booked under false pretenses, stating “I believe that I have the support of the large majority of citizens of Des Moines whose interests I am endeavoring to serve.”
I don’t doubt that he was correct about a majority supporting him, but I question his assertion that he was serving their best interests by denying space for a perspective many might have found unpalatable. And it turns out, he probably questioned it, too.
Because by 1940, his tune had changed dramatically. That’s when a local minister approached him about banning Hitler’s Mein Kampf from the library shelves, to which Spaulding responded, “If more people had read Mein Kampf, some of Hitler’s despotism might have been prevented.” It wasn’t the material that frightened him nearly as much as the “small minds” who wished to prevent others from engaging intellectually with controversial ideas.
He was also pretty outspoken against the frequent banning of Grapes of Wrath, for which I am grateful because it was one of the better books I was required to read in high school. And it was the fight over access to that book that led the American Library Association in 1939 to adopt the Library Bill of Rights, a slightly more generalized version of the one created specifically for the Des Moines Library by Forrest Spaulding in November of 1938.
Now, this is more or less an apolitical blog. As a writer who is not apolitical in my personal life, I do try very hard to keep it that way. I think there should be some places where we all can just have fun. But about this one issue I will shout loudly from every corner of every platform I ever have the opportunity to occupy.
Censorship is the death of freedom. And willfully ignoring or silencing the voices on the other side of an argument only leads to increased violence and instability. That’s not a Democrat or Republican thing. That’s a human thing.
Politically speaking, we’re still going through a rough patch here in the US. It’s been building for a long while and for a lot of reasons and it’s erupted in violence and destructive behavior more in the past few years than it had for quite a while. I think it’s safe to say that no matter our individual political bents, that’s kind of scary.
I remain optimistic that we’ll eventually weather it okay, not without fallout of course, but hopefully with the opportunity to move forward and be better. However, I am absolutely convinced that it will only get rougher if we silence one another.
And so, I ask you, please listen and consider, especially when those you tend to agree with are saying you shouldn’t. Turn on the channels you have a hard time watching, reach out to your friends who post things that make you want to block them, read the books and articles by authors you aren’t sure you trust, and look up the actual wording of the speeches of those politicians you wouldn’t mind seeing thrown out of office.
Don’t do this because you’ll likely find something to agree with them on. You might. You might not. Don’t do it because it will feel good. Because it probably won’t.
Do it because the humanity of the person on the other side of the argument matters as much as your own. Do it because they don’t really understand how you reached your conclusions, either, and maybe in the act of listening and considering, you both might see that your differing perspectives don’t actually make you all that different from one another.
It’s not too late to be part of the solution, even if we’ve failed in the past.
Forrest Spaulding once disallowed a speech by someone many of his library patrons would have found disagreeable. And by the standards he himself later laid out, that was the wrong thing to do. He then went on to speak out against censorship and was included on the American Library Association’s list of the hundred most important library leaders of the 20th century.
I know you may not think that such a list is a big deal, but I bet that like me, you know a few great librarians. So, consider that Mrs. G., the wonderful children’s librarian in my hometown when I was a kid, is not on that list. This is the woman who listened to me drone on and on about the books she’d probably read a hundred times because she knew that a reader becomes a thinker and a thinker becomes a person who can stand up and speak for the rights of all. That made a difference in my life and, I’m guessing, in a lot of lives. And she’s not even in the top 100.
And this is where I tell you that this morning, I very nearly decided to pull this post and replace it with a sillier, lighter re-run from the Practical Historian archives. Ah, the irony.
But next week will be sillier.
&%#$@!
In 1884, seven-year-old German-born Rudolph Dirks immigrated to the United States with his family and settled in Chicago. A gifted artist, Dirks began doodling comics at an early age and as a young man he moved to New York to seek out employment as an illustrator. Before long, he was hired onto the staff the New York Journal.
At the time, the New York Journal was in a heated circulation war with the rival New York World, which contained one of journalism’s first featured Sunday comic strips, The Yellow Kid. Dirks’s editor asked him to create a comic strip that would compete.
Reaching back to the tales of his childhood, Dirks created Katzenjammer Kids, based on an 1860 illustrated children’s story Max & Moritz by Wilhelm Busch, which tells of a pair of truly naughty boys who engaged in a series of brutal pranks and, in the grand tradition of German stories for children, wound up dying gruesome deaths.
The Katzenjammer Kids, whose names were Hans and Fritz, didn’t share the same terrible fate, but they were naughty. The comic strip consisted of their many shenanigans as they made life terribly difficult for a cast of adult characters that included, among others, their mother, a shipwrecked sailor, and a school official. These adults were sometimes, understandably, frustrated enough to say words that weren’t suitable for Sunday comics.
Dirks came up with a pretty clever solution for that. When his characters were wound up and so frustrated they couldn’t think straight enough to reach for better words, they said things like “%&$#!” instead.
The term for this handy little tool in the comic artist’s kit became official in 1964, when Beetle Bailey creator Mort Walker coined the term “grawlix” in an article he wrote for National Cartoonist Society. By then the cartoonist’s version of audio media’s bleep had been in common use since its initial appearance in Katzenjammer Kids in the early 1900s. And I for one, am grateful for that.
I’m not a big fan of profanity in general. I don’t use it much either as a writer or in my personal life. It’s not that I’m particularly shocked or offended by it and I don’t step too far out of the way to avoid it in the writing of others. I’m just aware that profanity seems to be the thing I reach for when it’s probably not the best time for me to speak.
It pops into my head, and if I’m not careful out of my mouth, when I’m angry, frustrated, exhausted, and irrational. When I write fiction, I do occasionally bring a character to that point and in those moments, a well-timed, and rare, use of profanity may be the best way to express his or her emotional state.
But for me, I find I’m usually best served by taking a deep breath and a step back to think about whether or not I need to communicate my feelings at all and if so, how best to do it. After all, according to some estimates, there are nearly a million words in the English language. Even if 800,000 or so of those are essentially obsolete, that still gives me a lot to work with.
Even with all of that at my disposal, I have found it difficult to put together the right words during these past few weeks of unrest in the United States. I’m angry of course; also worried about the future of the nation if we can’t redirect righteous anger into rational conversation and actionable solutions. Oh, and there’s still a pandemic, I think? I kind of just want to say, “&@#%$!”
I chose not to post to my blog last week because I realized that probably wouldn’t be that helpful for anyone. I didn’t know what words to send into the blogosphere. I had no comfort to offer readers who are likely feeling some of the same things I am and who maybe aren’t even ready to find comfort. I have prayed a lot and have found a great deal of personal peace in that, but I’m aware not everyone who stumbles across this blog views prayer in the same way I do.
So, a week later I still don’t have the right words. Because even with a million to choose from, sometimes the right one just can’t be found. Maybe we need some creative person to invent a new term for us. Or maybe we all really do just need to say a collective, “&%#$@!”
And then take a deep breath and a step back.
WU (What’s Up) With this ARE (Acronym-Rich Environment)?
It started out like any morning, with me rushing to get the kids out the door in time for school. That’s been a little harder lately as the days have gotten shorter and the mornings darker. But we were on track. Lunches were sorted, backpacks were loaded, and we were just stepping out into the garage when my 14-year-old son said, “OMG, BRB.”
I don’t know what he’d forgotten (besides the English language), but he ran quickly into his bedroom and back again. We were on our way, still with enough spare time that I could stop and ask, “What?”
He rolled his eyes. Probably—it was still kind of dark. “It means ‘be right back.’”
I rolled my eyes. Definitely—because he deserved it. “I KNOW what it means. I just think it makes more sense to speak actual words.”
Yes, I will freely admit that in that moment I sounded like an old person. I might as well have told him his favorite music was nothing but a bunch of loud noise or that he needed a haircut because he looks like a felon. BTW, one of those statements is true.
He shoved his stuff into the car next to his little brother and said, “Everyone uses text speak. It’s a thing you’re probably just going to have to get used to.”
Here I should clarify that my son is not generally disrespectful and this was said with a charming LOL.
And the thing is that the more I thought about it, the more I realized he might actually be right. Language does evolve, usually in ways we don’t really anticipate and, no matter how hard we try, not always for the simpler.
In March of 1906, American steel magnate Andrew Carnegie certainly tried. That’s when he recruited twenty-six influential men of letters to form the Simplified Spelling Board. Included among the membership were Melvil Dewey, who organized all the library books, and Mark Twain, who wrote quite a few of them.
The board combed through some of the most oddly spelled words in the English language to determine when and why they came to be spelled as they did. Then, so as not to confuse a change-resistant American populace, they recommended a list of just three hundred words that could be immediately simplified by influential organizations.
At least one additional powerful man agreed whole-heartedly. In August of 1906, then President Theodore Roosevelt ordered the implementation of the changes throughout all documents coming from the Executive Branch of the US government.
The press wasn’t having it and launched into sarcastic attacks on “Mr. Rucevelt” and the “notis” he’d taken of this truly important movement. The public largely agreed, and by December of that year, the House of Representatives, controlled by the president’s own Republican Party, issued a resolution supporting their strong preference for established dictionary spellings. They also said Teddy’s hair was too long and his music was too loud.
The president eventually gave up the fight and by 1920, the Simplified Spelling Board had dissolved, leaving behind a Handbook of Simplified Spelling and a nation that wasn’t particularly sorry to see them go.
But, some of those original three hundred new recommended spellings actually did get adopted into American English, including gram instead of gramme, maneuver instead of manoeuvre, and hiccup instead of hiccough. Because language evolves, and I guess I better get used to it.
For now, TYSM for reading and not marking this post TL;DR. I’m going AFK. TTYL.
See? I can evolve.
JK. I don’t textspeak.
No News is Good News
On April 18, 1930, at 8:45 pm British citizens who gathered around their radios to listen to the BBC news segment heard the following: “Good evening. Today is Good Friday. There is no news.” That announcement was followed by fifteen minutes of piano music and, I’m guessing, a fair bit of stunned silence in living rooms throughout the country.
Can you even imagine a news outlet making such a statement today? And if they did, can you imagine how we, the consumers, would react? I suspect the very absence of news would be viewed as a story in itself. Other media outlets would likely report that the BBC was losing its edge and failing in its duty to bring the news to the citizens of the world. Pundits might jump in with their own form of criticism, loudly arguing with one another about the new role of the media in propagating the nonstories of the day and longing for the good old days of the 24-hour news cycle.
Because we definitely live in a world driven by news. Whether it’s good, bad, fake, or irrelevant, it’s around us all the time, demanding our attention and affecting our mental health.
I’ve written about this before, about the need to occasionally take a little break, something I think all of us should consider occasionally doing. But I recently had a pretty lengthy experience doing just that.
I am not a strict adherent to the tradition of fasting from something during Lent. Still, this year, it occurred to me that I might have something in my life that I would genuinely benefit from giving up.
I chose, for forty days, to give up the news. I didn’t give up the news entirely of course. I’m on the internet a lot and I saw plenty of headlines. Also, scrolling through social media I occasionally spotted a story that had people riled up. But I tried very hard not to engage much with the stories I saw. I even entirely gave up my primary source of news, which for quite a few years has been talk radio.
For about two weeks, it was hard. Like really hard. I had this constant, nagging feeling that I was missing out on important discussions about important events that would dramatically shape the future of the world and how human beings relate to one another.
Then I realized, I wasn’t. Because any of the big stories, like the shootings in New Zealand, the fire at Notre Dame, or the bombings in Sri Lanka, managed to get through. And thankfully some other stuff didn’t. For example, for 40+ days, I had no idea what snarky tweets President Trump had sent out into the world, or what new candidate had thrown his or her hat into the Democratic presidential primary race, or what any of the Kardashians were getting up to.
And that felt kind of amazing.
For that forty days plus Sundays, my mind became a little less cluttered, my stress level became a little lower, and my perspective became a little bit healthier. It was like a great big mental cleanse. I thought I’d probably more or less stick with it by intentionally limiting my exposure to constant news.
Then today I had to make a long, early morning drive. Because music tends to make me sleepy behind the wheel I turned on talk radio. I found out that former Vice President Joe Biden is now the twentieth person officially running for the Democratic presidential nomination and that President Trump has already tweeted snark about it.
Neither of these two pieces of information was much of surprise. It kind of seemed like there really was no news to report, at least not at that time of today. Or perhaps the news outlets I tuned in to just weren’t reporting on the most surprising or fascinating stories. I mean, I still don’t know what the Kardashians have been up to lately.
A NaNoWriMo Eggs-periment
Sometime in the mid-1500s as the Spanish Inquisition held a firm grip on Naples, Renaissance man and notable genius of cryptography Giovanni Battista della Porta discovered a useful little trick. Several of his clever friends had been imprisoned for presumably not being quite Catholic enough and della Porta needed to get messages to them.
Everything that entered through the prison walls was carefully checked, with the exception of food deliveries. So, della Porta allegedly used a combination of vinegar and alum to write messages onto eggs. The special ink disappeared when the eggs were boiled, but the letters transferred through the semi-permeable shell and imprinted themselves on the membrane of the egg.
All della Porta’s nerdy heretic friends had to do was to carefully peel the egg, read the message, and eat the evidence. Not bad, and definitely more subtle than writing “Hoppy Easter” in white crayon before dyeing, which is how I usually convey secret egg messages.
Now I’ve found plenty of references to this little eggs-periment (see what I did there?), but what I haven’t been able to discover is what the messages might have been, or how della Porta’s friends knew to look for them, though I suppose if you peel and egg and discover words on the white, you probably go ahead and read them.
Were these escape plans? Tricks for correctly answering inquisitors’ questions to secure release? Clever microfiction featuring a dashing 16th century polymath who breaks his friends out of prison? Egg salad recipes? Alas, the world will likely never know, because egg messages rarely last very long.
But there are lots of words that go unread in the world, and not just the brilliant ones languishing between the covers of small potatoes authors you’ve never heard of. Just this past month thousands of writers joined in on National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and produced millions upon millions of words, many of which are brilliant, and a lot of them will never be read.
Because this was a sprint, and for many it was probably a slog. Some writers made it to the finish line of their goal (or will in the next thirty-eight hours) and many did not. I’m happy to be among those who completed the challenge, but what I can tell you is that you will never see most of the words I wrote.
They might as well be written in invisible ink on an egg white. Of course, they are here in my computer, all 50,000+ of them, waiting for me to trim and polish and hard boil. Only after I’ve done that will I allow anyone else to start peeling back the shell and reading them.
It’ll be a while. I’m excited about the book I just spent a huge number of hours drafting, but it’ll be many times that number of hours before I manage to turn it into something I’m proud to share. For now I’ll set is aside and let the hastily scribbled words soak into the eggshell while I change direction for a bit and write something completely different. Maybe I’ll see if I can put together some microfiction. I have a great idea for a story featuring a dashing 16th century polymath who breaks his friends out of prison using only a bowl of egg salad.
Celebrating Crack the Code Day with 17 Kitten Gifs
In 1799 a French soldier by the name of Pierre-Franҫois Bouchard, while serving in the Egyptian campaign of the Napoleonic Wars, discovered a repurposed slab built into Fort Julien, just outside the city of Rosetta. Though the slab had been relegated to the role of common brick, it seemed to Bouchard like the writing on it might have some greater significance.
He was right. What Bouchard had discovered would keep scholars busy for many years and essentially usher into existence the field of Egyptology. With his discovery, we finally had a translation of Egyptian hieroglyphs.
The stone featured the same royal proclamation in three languages: Hieroglyphics, Demotic, and Greek. Nobody could really read the first two, but if the third were placed within the proper historical context, it could be understood.
At the French defeat in Egypt, the Rosetta stone, along with most of the antiquities gathered by Napoleon’s men, passed into possession of the British where it has remained since, but it was a Frenchman that finally cracked the code.
Jean-Franҫois Champollion was a child prodigy with an insane gift for languages. Before the tender age of eleven he had conquered Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Chaldean as well as a few others. Upon discovering Egyptian hieroglyphs, young Jean-Franҫois declared to the brother who raised him that he would one day be the man to translate them. Nearly twenty years later, he figured out how to do it.
As I’m sure you already know (because it’s got to be a bank holiday somewhere), today marks the 196th anniversary of the day Champollion announced his discovery to the world in a letter read before the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres in Paris. Basically he explained that Hieroglyphs, like the Egyptian demotic language, contained both phonetic and symbolic parts, and by understanding how to distinguish between those methods of operation in the language, he could crack the code.
Of course he didn’t probably give enough credit to Englishman Thomas Young, whose previous work on Demotic had demonstrated the combination approach and the similarity between Demotic and Coptic, a language at the time still spoken in some Orthodox pockets, and you guessed it, by brilliant linguist Jean-Franҫois Champollion. Young, and frankly the rest of his countrymen, didn’t appreciate that very much, which led to the carving of some choice pictures into the bathroom stall doors of their hallowed institutions.
But Champollion was the one to finally put it all together, and within just a few years, he’d translated a great many hieroglyphic texts, opening up a whole new world of Egyptology. Finally everyone who was anyone who cared in the slightest (and there were probably at least a dozen or so of them) could know that when the ancient Egyptians carved “bird, foot, snake,” what they meant was, “kegger tonight at Zezemonekh’s house.” That’s loosely translated of course.
It was a big deal. Basically Champollion was to Egyptology what Urban Dictionary and good text translation sites are for today’s parents. Because I don’t know about you, but I don’t know what the heck these kids are talking about.
I have two sons, one of whom is a teenager with a cell phone and a lot of friends who communicate primarily in gifs and emojis. I do monitor his phone usage with a parental spy app (yes, he’s totally aware of this and understands that it’s just part of the deal of still being a kid and having protective parents), and I sometimes scroll through his texts. Though one can only take so much.
I am aware that sometimes texts are not exactly what they appear to be, which is why I’m grateful for the genius linguists who can cut through the pictures to derive some sort of meaning. Because I can’t make heads or tails of your average Egyptian stele or that series of seventeen kitten gifs sent to my son by some girl in his science class.
If you’re thankful, too and you want to celebrate what I’m choosing to dub “Crack the Code Day,” in honor of the contributions of Jean-Franҫois Champollion, you can pick up a copy of Gentleman of Misfortune, in which the genius Frenchman gets a nod. Or if you prefer, you could just enjoy some
Attack of the Hons
In 1924 a teacher named Jaime Garí i Poch discovered a curious drawing on a wall in the Cuevas de Araña, or Spider Caves, near Valencia, Spain. The drawing, which is as much as 15,000 years old, depicts a person on a rickety ladder, reaching up to gather honey from a beehive. It’s the oldest indication yet discovered that our ancestors were willing to risk life and limb and anger a swarm of stinging insects just to satisfy their sweet tooths.
It’s not a great leap, then, to the use of the word “honey” as a term of endearment, which according to the OED happened around the middle of the 14th century. Honey has long held an important place in the human experience. It’s worth striving for. Kind of like love.
So, enter honey, honey pie, honey bunches, honey bunny, or any other nauseating honey-themed nickname you can dream up. And let’s not forget the ubiquitous hon or hun, depending on whether you are comparing your loved one to a gooey sweet treat or a war-mongering barbarian.
And actually, I don’t mind the use of the word as a term of endearment. I have on occasion been known to use it when speaking to my husband or my children (when it can be either hon or hun, depending on the situation). My parents sometimes use it when speaking to me. It’s lovely that they do because it makes me feel treasured by some of the people who matter most in my life.
But when the checker at the grocery store, who is easily half my age, and who I have never met, calls me hon, I don’t like it. This recently happened to me and I posted about it on Facebook, polling the audience as to whether or not the incident should have bothered me.
The post generated a lot of comments, primarily divided along geographical lines. My friends who grew up in the Southern US or who live there now either defended the practice or said it didn’t bother them, while my more Northern friends took the opportunity to join the chorus of complaints. Others suggested that it was acceptable under only some circumstances, like if the person using the term were older, and not a man. It was an interesting string of comments, but I’m not sure I really got an answer to my question.
Should it bother me? I don’t know. I’m generally okay with and appreciate cultural diversity, and as our world shrinks through electronic and economic connectedness, I suppose clashes over minor differences in mannerisms are becoming more common. In the grand scheme of things, this one isn’t so bad. I mean I’m not going to correct the young lady. But I also recognize that I’m allowed to feel what I feel and openly complain about it on social media. Because that’s what we do, right?
Of course it could be worse. Not every language has grabbed on to honey, honey pie, honey bunches, honey bunny, or hon as go to terms of endearment. My husband, who is conversationally fluent in French, refers to me once in a while as his petit chou, a term that apparently sets French hearts to fluttering and literally translates as “little cabbage.” I’m pretty sure if the young lady at the grocery store checkout called me that, I’d go a little war-mongering barbarian on her.
So what do you think, my wider Internet community? Should I have been bothered?
Author Sarah Angleton 