Speech Class

I loved the whining/whinging discussion, and it got me thinking about accents that have gone missing. Like this:



No one talks about progrums anymore. No one puts a fancy little lilt when pronouncing the L in “language.” I think this way of talking starting disappearing when I was but une jeune fille myself.

This simultaneously saddens and delights me. Faith Salie had a bit on her radio show about Wilfred Brimley and his calling out to help people with “diabetuss.” Sarah Thyre, in her book, Dark at the Roots, cracked my ass up describing the volunteer who talked about “ravioliss.”

I used to have a Pittsburgh accent when I was a child. I slowly lost it and all that’s left is the vestigial: pronouncing “our” like “are” (or “ARH!”), saying “house” in a vaguely Germanic way, reassuring people that I’m not neb-nosing. It would be fun to have it back. Maybe there’s a progrum for just this thing?

The Ladies

The New York Times ran an article yesterday about the happiness of women as compared to the happiness of men. This is the sort of article that can careen right off the rails into Dr. Laura territory. Quit the workforce, ladies, because it makes you miserable! You won’t have time to track down your wandering uterus!

Thank you, Newspaper of Record, for not going there.

Did I ever think I’d find myself in agreement with something called the “hottie theory”? No, I did not. But have a look:

“[O]ne girl who had gotten a perfect 2,400 on her college entrance exams noted that she and her friends still felt pressure to be ‘effortlessly hot.’”

It’s not hotness pressure that’s so much the problem (this parenthetical was going to be about my being married, but I sort of like the ballsiness of implying that my hotness is NO PROBLEM, DAWGS) but just the sheer amount of responsibility. In the Times, the government and the menfolk get equal blame. I’d agree that we would sure appreciate some paid leave and universal preschool. And perhaps slovenly men should remain sequestered in their own filth.

But I’d make the case that it’s something larger that needs a fix: this whole cultural Zeitgeist (if I may) that shoves everything on the individual. That includes the government, the weird corporate set-ups where people move away from family and friends because their jobs require it, even the suburban architecture that hermetically seals up individual families. It’s not necessarily a gendered thing, but mothers bear a lot of the brunt of this isolation and effort of reinvent the wheel.

After Caleb was born, the hospital at which I delivered had a nurse come by the house, to check on me, check on the baby, check on the breastfeeding technique. It was a nice visit, I thought, just a week or two postpartum. Then the nurse took my blood pressure and it was high. Super high. I needed to check back into the hospital within the hour, she said. I got hysterical. I bawled as I packed my bag, bawled as Brandon packed his and Caleb’s bags, bawled as I walked her to the door.

It wasn’t the blood pressure that had me upset, but the idea that already, I had failed. I had been valiantly keeping up with this new situation in my life, Brandon and handling it, handling Caleb, all by ourselves like we were supposed to. And the hospital was defeat.

Eventually (somewhere while writing PP), I stopped buying into the idea that it was some sort of virtue to do everything yourself. It’s the dream of the toddler. That, and a dessert with every meal.

Body Moving

Did you see this? (I did via Jezebel.)

It’s a claim that exercise doesn't lead to weight loss because it makes you hungrier. Huh. On the one hand, I enjoy any public huzzah stressing that weight is fairly pre-determined. On the other hand, as much as I hate exercise—and I do, with the sweating and the red-facedness and the boob-napping bra—I don’t care if weight loss is a benefit. It’s good for the mood and good for the heart.

I’m still doing my walk that I started under Dr. Weil’s tutelage. I say “still” as if there weren’t a three-season gap. Anyway, I’m back on it and am feeling committed enough that we bought a treadmill. Because, truly, there’s about a two-degree span of temperatures I consider appropriate for outdoor exercise.

Also because, I walk with the iPod and it was becoming increasingly obvious that, if I wanted to go about my walk the way I wanted to (rocking and rolling and whatnot), I should steer clear of other people. I don’t have the breath, once I really get going, to sing along with all the lines, so I’d be walking past some students at the bus stop, muttering random lines from songs. Huff, huff, gooood, huff huff, cold and wet on the grass to me, huff huff, fucking people over.

I shouldn’t care about how I come across while exercising, but even I could see I was about one fist shake and two bad teeth away from being a person to whom one gives a wide berth.

Word

You know what I love about editing? It’s like the working girl’s grad program. You get to duck into someone else’s language and figure out what makes it good or different or even beautiful. I don’t really do the beautiful, the difficult, the complex of structure in my own writing—I have reasons, or maybe justifications, for this—but I’d almost forgotten the geeky delight I can take in just the right word. “Rakish” is awesome.

Other words, I will never ever use.

1. “Whinging”—It’s the new “whining.” Some people can pull this off. Others come off the way Madonna comes off with her new accent. A little too fahncy in the pahnts.

2. “Full disclosure:”—Occasionally, people actually are providing full disclosure. Mostly though, it’s a nice of way of saying “Name-Dropping.” (Full disclosure: I was once in a television green room with the writer Ann Brashares.)

3. “Inexorably”—It means “unyieldingly.” It’s just kind of ugly.

4. “ Webinar”—For real? People say this with a straight face?

5. “Natch”—I finally figured out that this is slang for “naturally,” but it still makes me, inexplicably, think of pubic hair.

Give me your tired, your overused, your pet language peeves yearning to be set free in the comments section!

Working Gal

So, I'm back at Brain, Child. And can I say how much I'd forgotten how much work it is? And can I worship at the alter of Stephanie, Tracy, Elizabeth, and Clover for the jobs they've done the past couple years and continue to do? And can I have a beer?

Whew. I'm whipped. All the funny has been whipped out of me. (That sounds like a good Southern mama phrase, doesn't it? "Raphine, you wipe that grin off your face before I whip the funny right out of you!") But I had to share this, for those of us with early bedtimes:

Something Strange Afoot at the Circle A

I read this very interesting piece by Christopher Hanson in the Columbia Journalism Review. He critiques the magazine Men's Health. I don't know Men's Health (or men's health, really), but Hanson basically throws out a charge that could apply to many service magazines: that they're only offering up half the picture by devoting all the space to what people can control.

Hanson says:

"Imagine a Venn diagram with two circles that barely intersect. Circle A represents such health challenges as obesity, high cholesterol, blood pressure, and blood sugar. A Men’s Health reader can generally overcome these on his own with sound nutrition, diet, exercise, and other disease-prevention routines. Circle B represents systemic national health risks, which a reader acting alone can’t defeat. These threats include tainted food imports, drinking water laced with dangerous chemicals, employee health benefits slashed by corporations, and private health-insurance policies that cost more while covering less."

He goes on to say that Men's Health is almost entirely confined to Circle A, and even within Circle A, the experts promise much more than they can deliver. Mostly by promising "instant" fixes. In a larger sense, the magazine gives the illusion that an individual can fix whatever ails her or him. (To which I say, Excuse me, sir, but that's my soundbite.)

But it's interesting, I think, is that this is finally creeping in, in a noticeable way, to service magazines targeted to men. Women, and mothers in particular, have been getting it for ages. When I was picking the experts to test for Practically Perfect, the hardest part was narrowing the field down.

And you know what occurred to me later, after Brandon got a job here in town and was able to stop the insane commute and just be here more? That a lot of advice from Hanson's Circle A is really a kind of distraction. Sure, I could throw on some lipstick before my man got home, or we could sit around deciding which animal the other most resembled, but it was the Circle B stuff—the commute, the job insecurity, the long hours—that was really the issue in our marriage. Some of the other issues I looked at were equal parts from each circle (health, say), but it really struck me what an impact the less controllable parts of our lives had on our marriage.

Interesting stuff. Go ahead and have a look-see.

Hello, U.K.

If I ever go to the U.K., I already know what I'll do. I'll sit and eavesdrop all day long. I love the accent, love the slang, love the different words (Amazon will "dispatch" books!). I love how the questions are not really inflected as questions, are they.

This came out in the Times of London today, and thank God because I could barely hold my breath about it any longer. I had a great conversation with the reporter, Carol Midgley. When it was over, she said, "Brilliant!" (It took me a sec to understand that she meant it in the way that I mean "Excellent!" Which is to say, "I'm done! Let's stop talking!") Still, I was tickled that I briefly believed that I had been a brilliant conversationalist.

I can't even begin to describe how rock star I felt at the photo shoot. First off, check out Shahar's website. Then, understand that I changed my clothes three times. Then, imagine how excited I was to learn that all those hours of watching America's Next Top Model paid off in a small way! I did different poses! Sadly, I forgot to be 100 pounds or even remotely "fierce."