Bruce the Blog

To no one’s surprise in medialand, there was a rash of emails flooding our inboxes today that started with the fateful phrase, “Due to inclement weather …  is cancelled.”

Except for one such email that stood out — for the wrong reason.  In fact, it almost caused Grammar Geek to gag on his thesaurus (talk about an endangered species). This email spoke of “in climate” weather. It was sent by a school district. From someone whose title is “Key Communicator.” Sigh.

Discretion being the better part of pallor, we’ll refrain from identifying the school district to protect the guilty, but movie fans will recognize the municipality as the very tony east coast moviestar colony made famous in “Fatal Attraction.” And anagrammarians might visualize its name as a combination of sleeping furniture and the most famous American automaker. But I don’t want to identify the fancy shmancy town whose school district made such a stunningly uneducated gaffe.

Other than evoking the studied inarticulateness of 1960s standup comic Norm Crosby — a regular on The Ed Sullivan Show who made a career out of purposely mispronouncing words in the service of humor for the masses — “in climate” (the sender of course intended the word to be “inclement”) proves my long-held theory that subliteracy largely derives from the tendency of people to spell and pronounce words based not on understanding basics of the English language — relegating it to the English languish — but on intuitive (and more problematically, counter-intuitive) phonetics. Witness those who say “supposably” instead of  the correct “supposedly” or “hone in on” instead of the correct “home in on” or “for all intensive purposes” instead of the correct “for all intents and purposes.”  There are many more such examples that we don’t have thyme for.

Meanwhile, back at the meteor-illogical ranch, with the accuracy of some forecasts lately, I worry more when the prognosticators predict little or no snow. How often, or so it seems, have we been forewarned about an avalanche of frosty flakes only to have the little kiddies disappointed the next morning when the school bus stops on time at the corner as always.

That makes it all the more bemusing that nowadays school districts can’t wait to cancel classes a day in advance on the strength — or weakness, as the case may be — of a forecast. It’s like a doctor treating a patient for pneumonia after hearing the sniffles because, well, you just never know what it might turn into.

Why, when I was a kid in the rough-and-tumble former potato fields of Long Island’s western Nassau County, I had to trudge a whole block to school in the snow. In my galosh-shod feet. It had to snow 18 inches for school to be canceled. Or maybe it was 8. You know how big things look when you’re four feet tall. But let’s not nitpick. Back then, men were men, and kids were kids and snowmen were snowmen. A little frozen precip was hardly reason to bypass readin’ and writin’.

Not in the weather-wimpy 21st Century, though. When I told my wife Elyse that the schools already were canceled for Friday by 6:00p Thursday, she told me how Thursday counted as a school day even though students were dismissed at 10:00 a.m. and a school district needs to use up those snow days.

I looked at her in disbelief: “Oh, that’s nice. Early dismissal means today they didn’t learn much of anything, but here we are conversing casually about some bureaucratically-bungled rulemaking that dictates it still can count as a school day?” As the non-commital slacker types are quick to say … whatever.

The way I look at it, with the snow-drift-high school taxes we are privileged to pay, what business is it of mine or yours how far in advance classes are canceled. If anything, it probably is more cost-efficient and stress-reducing to plan ahead. I get it. I’m a lowly taxpayer: just shut up and pay up, like a good little lemming.

Here’s an idea for a revisionist rubric: Let’s teach kids math by having them count snow days. That’ll work just swell.

Please go to The English Languish page for today’s blog entry. Thank you for turning the page on Bruce the Blog.

Okay, first that header. No, it’s not about a depleted jar of a branded ice tea powder mix. Nester is among those misnomers we’ve come to take for granted, even if they don’t make much, or any, sense. In avian terms, a nester is like a bird feeder. While it’s commonly assumed the “nester” in empty “nester” refers to the parents of children no longer living under the same roof, “nester” in fact means the home itself. So, Elyse and I are not nesters, we’re denizens of the nester, or nestees.

If you think about it (and believe me, I do), the same misnomer status obtains with the commonplace term “homophobia.” It’s actually a colloquialism rooted in a derogatory expression, not in the discipline of etymology. Broken down, homophobia literally means “fear of homo.”

Etymologically, the prefix homo- denotes two or more people or objects  or concepts alike in characteristics, hence homogenous to mean a group of similar things or homonym to mean words that sound alike, or, more to the point, homosapien to mean the species to which we all belong — human beings.

Applying the stringent rules of grammar, then, the coinage homophobia connotes fear of those similar to you, which is virtually the inverse of its common usage to mean fear of those different from you.

So, that’s my linguistics prologue to kick off an entirely unrelated topic. 

Which is this clarion call to arms: Empty nestees of the nesters unite!  You know what that’s about.

My creative idol Stephen Sondheim said, “When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way.” I say, when you’re an empty nestee, you got no kids around, you’re a familyless man. A little dramatic, I know, but please don’t revoke my poetic license.

Well, when you’re an empty nestee, there’s nobody around who doesn’t need to pop a cocktail of pills every day (some prescribed by physician, some prescribed by paranoia). There’s nobody around who doesn’t need to unbed during the graveyard shift to find relief in the loo. There’s nobody around who isn’t performing nose and ear and unibrow electrolysis before or after every shower.

When the kids hightail it to college or marriage or just lives of their own (”how rude!,” as Elyse would — and does — say) outside the cozy comforts of womb sweet womb, the peace and quiet are enough to drive you crazy.

Well, now it’s the year-end holiday season, when the kids who are doing who knows what in college are, for the winter interregnum, doing who knows what at home. You know what that’s about. Even when they are rumored to be home from the University of Tiass (This is a stickup, sucker: give me all your money to pay for the next four years for the rest of your life), there’s still, it seems, nobody home except for those who fulfill all aforementioned obligations that accompany the aging process.

Our daughter Elissa has been home ever since that fateful Friday a fortnight ago when I drove six hours in one limbs-in-limbo day to pick her and her friend up at their dorm and ferry them back to what used to be their forlorn norm before being liberated from high school and the ‘rents (that would be us oldsters).

It’s not that playing collegial chauffeur isn’t fun. It’s just that in the course of the arctic expedition to the snow belt of New York State, the mind drifts in aimless mischief to visions of sugar plum fairies, dental surgery, chestnuts roasting on an open fire, and colonoscopy, which for some reason reminds me of the time my car was rear-ended, pushing its tailpipe clear into the Corinthian leather interior like a sneaky snake named Alger Hiss presumably up to no good, but later acquitted of all allegations, thanks to a clean bill of health.

So ask Elyse and I where Elissa has been since she got home? Go ahead, ask us. No, really, I mean it. Take your time. We have no place to go. It’s she who has all the places to go that we don’t know about. We might be able to have a clue were it not for the lithium battery sadly losing its will to live on the homing device we surreptitiously attached to Elissa’s ankle as she was unconscious one day at 2:00 in the afternoon (or maybe she was just sleeping).

Attempts at humor aside, she’s really a good kid. Actually, she’s a great kid, who was pleased as spiked punch to attend a SUNY school (at Oneonta), not that that has anything to do with her being a great kid and all.

True, there are some subtle benefits to having a kid in the SUNY system. Thanks to state subsidies, the thermostat in our house overnight is only set at about 40 (and only that high because Elyse is a compassionate and forgiving god of budgetary prudence, aka tightwad), compared to what the thermostat might be set at if our darling daughter were matriculating at a private school. I don’t even want to think about that alternate university universe. By contrast, kids who perform random acts of matriculation at state colleges only get letters to their parents reprimanding them. Thank goodness for small-school favors. We are truly blessed. And, like most college kids, she is truly blissed.

At least Elissa had the enterprise and thoughtfulness to share a small part of her generous holiday downtime with a local pizzeria, a humanitarian effort for which she is cutely, if not handsomely, compensated. She worked there last summer and the owner flipped for her. Granted, in his business, flipping is part of the daily routine, but let’s not pick nits, and, while we’re at it, I like mine half pepperoni, half mushrooms, and don’t forget to hold the anchovies!

Even though Pizza Princesa Elissa was assigned evening hours, all the way to closing time, she, like her nocturnal paternal forebear, is a night person, so we know she won’t get home pasta her bedtime, which means there’s little danger of her being pie-eyed, in the sober sense of the word, plus she stands to make some decent spending dough, which she’ll knead back at college, where she’s a sister in Phi Sigma Sigma (the sorority was so nice, they named it twice), either that or they ran out of letters and had to double up. These are, after all, recessionary times. Damn you, Ben Bernanke).

It goes without saying that the vessels of the genes from whence Elissa sprang will be sad when she must return to the Land of Oneonta in the mist of the midst of January. We’ll miss missing her at home, and look forward with eager anticipation and total bemusement to the next time she’s home when once again we won’t know where she is, but also once again will be secure in the knowledge of where she surely is not: hanging out with the decidedly uncool (except when it’s 40 degrees overnight) empty nestees.