What Kind of English?

This semester I will be teaching a freshman seminar in English. It is designed to help new students adapt to life in college and learn the basics of succeeding at this new stage of their lives. I plan to spend a lot of time teaching students to write well in English. I often get criticized for being such a stickler for the correct usage of language.

“What you don’t understand is that language is all about experimentation. You have to allow students to be creative with it,” people often tell me. I have heard hints that I care so much about good grammar and rich vocabulary because I am an immigrant and English is not my first language. This supposedly makes true linguistic creativity of a native speaker incomprehensible to me. It has even been hinted that I’m a racist if I don’t think that double and triple negatives are appropriate in an academic paper. As if we would do any favors to our students by preventing them from developing a correct and beautiful writing style.

I passionately believe in the importance of being creative with one’s language. However, you can only proceed to work on your own unique style of writing after you have mastered the rules of correct usage. Starting each sentence with an “actually” or a “basically” is not creativity. It is nothing but intellectual laziness. And “I would have did” is simply wrong. If it makes me a hopeless old frump to insist that nouns and verbs should agree in number, then so be it. If I have learned not to write “he say” in a language that is not my own, it is not too much to expect from my monolingual students.

People in Montreal

I keep having this feeling that everybody here in Montreal is staring at me, and it wasn’t that way before. There are two possible reasons for this. Either I have become hopelessly provincial and am imagining this. Or my spectacular beauty has grown so spectacular that people can’t help staring.

I kind of like my second explanation more.

Death Penalty and Charlie Manson’s Cult

So I just finished reading Vincent Bugliosi’s account of the Charlie Manson trials. (If you are surprised by my reading choices during a vacation, remember that I have high blood pressure which I’m always trying to keep in check).

I have always been completely opposed to the death penalty for the obvious reasons. However, reading this kind of book is enough to make one wonder. At the time the book was updated several years ago, Charlie Manson – who hadn’t even been present when the crimes were committed – was incarcerated at a maximum security facility. The women who committed the brutal murders, however, were living in two-person cottages, kept getting married and spent their days making quilts, composing songs, and playing guitars. They never had to work for a day for their living. The taxpayers were the ones who had to work to keep these murderers in food, guitars, and wedding arrangements. They are all eligible for parole, too.

I didn’t suddenly become a death penalty supporter after reading the book. It did, however, disturb me. There is something deeply wrong here that needs to be repaired.

How to Become a Failure at Blogging

Blog from an iPad. I just flagged my own blog as mature. This is a compliment if addressed to a human being but a very negative thing when you qualify a blog this way.

I have very small fingers, too. Imagine what people with bigger fingers go through if they try to harness iPads for their blogging needs.

At least, I hope everybody appreciates my unwavering dedication to blogging in view of this hardship.


The people of Spain have had it with corrupt politicians, an inept government, unemployment, the endless economic crisis, and the two-party system that allows for no genuine dissent. They have taken to the streets and formed a movement of people who are indignant at the current situation, the indignados.

Jonathan offers a collection of slogans the indignados use in their struggle that he translated into English. The slogans are brilliant, funny, and tragic at the same time. Do head over here to read them: http://jonathanmayhew.blogspot.com/2011/08/indignados.html

I promise it will be a rare treat.

P.S. Sorry for the weird way of entering a link into the post. I’m blogging from an iPad which makes everything more complicated.

How to Become a Failure

1. Choose financial success as your only motivation. When selecting a Major in college or a new job, only choose those that will supposedly bring you the most money.

2. Whenever you meet a successful person in your field, immediately decide that they got to their place in life because they slept with the right people, had connections, or were lucky.

3. Collect stories about people who became rich and successful through a stroke of luck. Reject stories of those who worked hard to achieve success by explaining them in terms of the previous point.

4. Whenever you are passed by for promotion or get your article rejected, immediately conclude that people have conspired to keep you down because they are intimidated by your brilliance.

5. Never contemplate the possibility that your work might be far from perfect and you still might need to learn and improve. You are a hundred times brighter than most other people in your field and deserve to be at least as successful as they are with no extra effort.

6. Conclude that the world is basically unfair, so it makes no need to keep trying.

7. See every sign of economic well-being in a colleague or friend as a sign that they sold their soul.

8. Constantly imagine yourself on your own yacht in the Caribbean but, whatever you do, do not create a practical strategy of how you can get there.

9. Remember that working hard for decades to reap the rewards later on in life is not for you. You deserve the best and you should be getting it right now.

10. Choose a group of people who are to blame for everything that goes wrong in your life: women, Jews, Arabs, gays, immigrants, the disabled. Come what may, dont forget that it is all their fault.

Other suggestions to the list are welcome.

Happy Parenthood Stories

“You always tell me about the hardships of parenting,” I said to my sister. “I get it that you are exhausted, sleepless, and stretched very thin. But there have to be some things that make it all worth it for you, right? Why don’t you talk about them?”

“Well, I always feel like people don’t want to hear about the rewards of parenting because such stories sound soppy and sentimental,” she responded.

I want to hear them! Please, dear parents, share some of the stories about what makes it all worth it for you. Feel free to be as sentimental as you like. 🙂

In Search for Sexual Innocence

Since I wrote this post, people have been bombarding me with questions and quoting Hugo Schwyzer recent really good and convincing post titled “Love is never about wanting to be first.” The point of the post is that searching for sexual innocence in a partner is wrong and constitutes evidence of weird ideological hangups. Hugo is right, that’s what it is. Except when it’s a genuine sexual preference one has. Just like there are people who are into BDSM, polyamory or any seemingly unconventional sexual behavior, there are people who are genuinely into having sex with sexually unsophisticated partners. It doesn’t mean that they are into dominating the partner or serving as their teacher outside of the bedroom. That’s simply who they are sexually.

So how do you know if you are talking to somebody who is simply into sex with innocent partners for no ideological reason as opposed to a Fundamentalist freak who uses sex to serve an unhealthy sexual agenda? Like genuine polyamorous or BDSM folks, such a person will never lecture you about the number of partners you have had or try to show you the error of your ways whose only “defect ” is being different from their ways.