O: Obsequious (A-Z Blog Challenge: Evocative words)

You might think that Eddie Haskell is a remnant of the 50s, long gone. But I assure he is alive and well and walking middle school hallways today. His obsequious tone is heard every day, every time a young man finds himself in trouble with his teachers, who are mostly women old enough to be his mother.

Mostly, these boys are using the tone ironically. It's not that they really think the insincere praise will be believed. Instead, they hope that it will make the angry woman laugh, that she will charmed by them and her ire will be defused.

I  don't know how I feel about it, being the teacher on the receiving end.

On the one hand, I understand the value of humor in diffusing a tense situation.  But it rankles a little. There's something patronizing in it, something that says my anger is not to be taken seriously. I don't anger easily. I'm not quick to raise my voice. But, when I do, I'm serious about it. I mean it. I don't like the gender relations implied here.

Then I waffle, thinking of it from the kid's point of view. A middle school age boy draws a lot of ire in this world. He is loud, giggly, wiggly, distractible. He may look like a man, but he is still a child.

If you look at classroom interactions for children of this age, the boys get in more trouble than the girls. They don't play the game as well as the girls yet. If I heard my name said in annoyance and anger as often as I know some of these boys do, I would be looking for a way to diffuse the situation, too.

So, as in so many things, I try to take it slowly. To guide young men through respectful, appropriate interactions with the women in their lives, one conversation at a time. It's a big job. I hope I can handle it with the grace and humor that Mrs. Cleaver did.
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This post is part of the Blogging from A-Z Challenge.

N: Negligent (A-Z Blog Challenge: Evocative words)

You should know better!

That's the difference between negligence and ordinary forgetfulness or carelessness. If I forget my keys or a book I was supposed to return, I was careless. If I forget to pick up my child, I'm negligent. Like yesterday's post about Mendacity. There are lies and there are LIES.  It's all a matter of scale.

In our litigious society, the standard for what can be construed as negligence is becoming distorted indeed. A fast food place is sued because someone burned herself on their coffee.  Was it really negligence that the coffee wasn't labeled as hot? After all, most of us expect coffee to be hot. Could we instead sue the mother of the coffee-burnt woman for not teaching her child that coffee might be hot?

That situation smacks of the ridiculous and is certainly very different than an employer who knows that something in the workplace environment will give the employees cancer, but chooses not to do anything about it.

This is one of the reasons that words are so important, and that hyperbole and other types of exaggeration can be dangerous. 

As Mark Twain said, "The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."

Let's keep a sense of proportion here, people.
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This post is part of the Blogging from A-Z Challenge.

M: Mendacity (A-Z Blog Challenge: Evocative words)

Mendacity.

What a word! Most dictionaries define it simply as untruthfulness, but the connotations are stronger than that. This is no mere fib we're talking about, no white lie, no innocuous sin of omission. This is big, powerful and persuasive lying. Audacious lies that can break a person on the soul-level. Lies with evil intent.

Sheer mendacity.

Put this word with its common bed-mate and it's even worse. Sheer mendacity. Utter, unmitigated, unadulterated.

Or maybe it's sheer in the sense of steep and abrupt. Sheer like the drop from a cliff.

Or sheer as in transparent. Mendacity that doesn't even try to hide behind a screen. Entirely visible. Just pushing and pushing and seeing if anyone will step up and call it what it is.

Mendacity is a kind of lying that requires a real commitment. It's not for the shy or weak-willed. It takes a big personality.

That what makes the word work so well in the scene above. Tennessee Williams, writer extraordinaire of scenery-chewing emotionally harrowing speeches for his characters, loved the word, most famously used here in Cat on Hot Tin Roof.

His are not works of quiet emotion or subtlety. No, the pain is unbearable, the protest over the top.  The emotions are all at full volume. A woman can't be just upset in a play by Tennessee Williams. No, she's distraught. A man is not merely saddened, but devastated.

It's not melodrama. The anguish is quite real and honestly felt. But it is assuredly dramatic.

The lies are big, too. Big enough to hide a wealth of other dark emotions inside. Mendacious.

Thank you, Tennessee Williams, wordsmith extraordinaire.
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This post is part of the Blogging from A-Z Challenge.

L: Languid (A-Z Blog Challenge: Evocative words)

Today was a beautiful spring day. The kind full of the promise summer and long hours full of fun and freedom. The kind I remember from childhood as long, lazy and languid. Lovely.

Of course, I was busy. I had life errands to run that kept me indoors too much of the day. Responsibilities to meet.

When I finally got out to enjoy the day, it was already early afternoon. I took my dog for a long walk, which is good for both of us, in heart and body.

On our walk, we passed a community green space, just one of those side of the road patches of grass and greenery that don't belong to any particular person. It was overgrown with wildflowers and pretty flowering weeds. I had this desire to lie down in the little patch of greenery and stare up at the clouds for a while. To maybe pick some of the weed-flowers and weave them into a crown.

I didn't do it. Neither of my kids were with me--kids are an excellent excuse to do things adults aren't supposed to do anymore. Plus, if I laid down in the side of the road, someone would call 911 thinking I'd had a heart attack or something. My dog would go nuts. It wouldn't end well. So, sadly, there were no flower crowns in my spring afternoon.

In the midst of what my mother terms "the busy years" with two school age children, a dog, a husband, a family, a career, and a little bit of social/personal life to manage, I miss languid days. Daydreaming. Not keeping track of time, knowing my mother would come fetch me when it was time to rest up for another long, flowing day the next day. Sometimes it sucks to be a grown-up.

Yesterday, my baby was seven. May she have many languid days in her future!

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This post is part of the Blogging from A-Z Challenge.

K: Kleptomaniac (A-Z Blog Challenge: Evocative words)

I think I was an older kid or an earlier teenager when I first heard the word kleptomaniac.

I misheard it and thought is was Keptomaniac. That made sense to me since my parents were talking about a visitor to our home who had stolen some small items of mine. I think they were talking about what to say to the girl's parents and how to get them back. She had Kept my stuff, and I thought she was a Maniac.

Sometime later, I learned the real word. And that it was a real thing. That idea that you could have an uncontrollable compulsion to steal was new to me and fascinating. Even cooler that we had a word for that.

Then I learned there was other "manias." Tons of them in fact. It was almost as fascinating a list as the list of phobias I had been collecting.

Language can be so specific at times. Who knew that we needed a word that means "excessive desire to stay in bed"? (It's clinomania, BTW) I mean, isn't that just called adolescence?

For a while, I thought I wanted to be a psychiatrist because I was so interested in these kinds of words to describe our obsessions, peccadilloes and predilections. But really, I was just in love with words.

I loved how some of these terms seemed so obvious as to be made up on the spot. Scribbleomania: obsession with scribbling? Really?

Others made me feel smart because I recognized the word parts. Xenomania (inordinate attachment to foreign things) and her sister xenophobia (unreasonable fear of foreign things).

A whole lot of the words were about sex in one way or another. Andromania, Cytheromania, Erotomania, and, of course, Nymphomania.

I'm still fascinated, both by the words and the obsessions they describe. All of our messy little quirks formalized in language. I guess that means I made a good choice in writing. I could wallow in this stuff all day.
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This post is part of the Blogging from A-Z Challenge.

J: Juxtapose (A-Z Blog Challenge: Evocative words)

Juxtapose.

Neat word. It totally looks made up. Pose, I get. "To place in a desired position." But "Juxta"? Probably excellent for Scrabble with J and X in the same word, but what a weird combination of letters! It sounds like the name of a Star Wars alien.

Juxtapose.

It's an interesting concept as well, the way a simple rearrangement of objects can make you perceive them very differently.

I can look at my almost seven year old girl and think, "Gosh, she's still so tiny." But then, if we juxtapose her position on the sofa, so she's next to her brand new baby cousin, she's going to seem huge. The contrast really changes your perspective.

It's an important concept in art and ideas as well.  What paintings are displayed next to what paintings makes a difference in how I view them, in what I notice. How I feel about what I'm reading or viewing is colored by whatever else I have recently viewed or read.

It's vital as a writer. A writer-friend of mine advises that writers need to read a variety of things. The magic happens, he says, when disparate ideas bump up against each other in your brain.

I agree.

My first novel came from this sort of juxtaposition. The idea came when that almost-seven-year-old was a newborn. We were at the supermarket. As many mothers do, I placed her carseat in the car, left the car door open and crossed the few feet to the cart corral, then returned. I had this unreasonable fear though that I would be hit by a car in the parking lot.

So, that was one idea.

I had been reading a bit about schizophrenia, hoping to better

understand what was going on with some people I care about.

That was another idea.

Someone else I care about was trying (unsuccesfully) to get pregnant. So, I was thinking and reading about fertility as well.

That was the third idea.

Juxtapose these ideas in Samantha's brain and press "blend." Voila! You have yourself a novel. His Other Mother (currently in its next round of publication limbo, being considered for publication).

I love how the brain works!
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This post is part of the Blogging from A-Z Challenge.

I: Individualism or My Inner John Wayne (A-Z Blog Challenge: Evocative words)

I place high value on individualism. Idiosyncrasy. Independence. Being yourself even when there is pressure to mold yourself into something else.

It gives me a great sense of self-worth to think that I can take care of myself and my own, rather than relying on others. It's one of my core values as a person. The Duke and I probably wouldn't have liked each other in person. I'm way too liberal for his taste. Nonetheless, my inner John Wayne is loud and proud.

When I do have to ask for and accept help, I'm much more comfortable with a trading of favors (I'll watch your kids, then you can watch mine), or asking family members who are then free to ask me for help.  It's a balance. It falls apart if I'm asking more favors than I am giving or vice versa.

The older I get and the more I learn about the world, the more I realize that this focus on the self (as opposed to the collective or the whole group) is a very western thing. Very American of me.

This world-view is at the center of many inter-cultural conflict moments.  It's part of why and how we judge each other as parents, workers, and people.

As the world becomes a more global place and people with disparate backgrounds, values and expectations come into interaction with each other, we see this conflict more and more. It's disconcerting. It can make you feel really uncomfortable and make you judge others harshly and unfairly. It's really not about right and wrong, just about different expectations.

For example, my daughter was in a choral group with a girl whose family is from Korea.  (See chart: Korea, low on the individualism scale).  We both also had younger daughters, so, often, while our older children were rehearsing, we'd take our little ones to the playground. Several other mothers were in the boat and our children would run around and play together while we all talked to each other or played with our phones.

The other United States-born mothers and I might leave the playground briefly, but we would turn to one of the other mothers and directly ask them to keep an eye on our little ones and would admonish our little ones to listen to Mrs. So-and-So.  In this way, we still took individual responsibility for our children.

The Korean-born mother didn't do this. She, to our American eyes, seemed to just drift away from the group and assume all would be well. When intervention was needed (child conflict or injury), none of us was sure who should step in and what she should do. No one had individual responsibility for that child, you see, and we had not experience of a true collective society experience. Awkward, to say the least.

I've watched this happen among my colleagues at various schools, too. People born Up East can have a hard time here in North Carolina.  Social cues are very different. Confrontation is handled much more quietly and you are expected to keep your individual agitation to yourself.

I do okay in these situations. I don't take personal offense, and tend to try to look at the broader picture. Maybe it's because I am a foreign language teacher, so inclined to think about culture. Maybe it was those broadening effects of travel my parents were promised when they helped me travel in my youth. Maybe it's just that I've lived in more than one place and had to adjust to how they do things there.

Whatever it is, I wish I knew how to share it. I think we could avoid a lot of ugliness (hate speech, racism, violence) if we could stop trying to make everything black and white and assume the good intentions of others. Approach with an eye to understanding rather than an eye to judgment.

If you figure out how to teach that, please let me know. I've got a lot of children I'd like to help.

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This post is part of the Blogging from A-Z Challenge.