Month: January 2018

Solicited advice

Published elsewhere, in answer to a middle aged dad’s specific questions as to what is permissible for his demographic, particularly in dealing with teen aged children.

Sports jersey: You can wear it if it is a throwback jersey from the time you would have been the appropriate age — say an ugly 70s or 80s jersey. That would be cool — if anyone got it, anyway.

New music: The best way to do this is to find new songs you like but your kids hate. Play and sing them all the time. Or, if you can summon this out of your memory, annoy them by demonstrating how a new song is really just a copy of an older one you know and play the older one constantly. You’ll be right and they’ll know it but won’t want to admit it.

Hairstyle: The only change permitted is to something shorter — and shorter all around, not just on the sides or some other contemporary look.

Car window down: Absolutely, but no loud music. You can’t win no matter what you play. You don’t need the attention.

Talking to kids’ friends: Okay, but only about specific subjects, like sports teams they are on, colleges they are applying to, or anything admirable that they do that your kids refuse to do. “How’s your job going? Do you feel you’ve learned about [insert anything]?”

Social media: It will change faster than you can keep up, so pick a medium and stubbornly stick to it — with pride.

T-shirt: Your kids are right. Plain t-shirts are the best option in public at this point. It’s too much trouble to gauge your interlocutors’ appreciation for something else, and, if you think about it, you probably don’t really want them casting lengthy glances at your t-shirt to figure out what it says.

Collecting baseball cards and/or asking for autographs: Cards, sure, but why? You’ve got enough junk already and you won’t live long enough to find out if any of them are valuable. Autographs, no. I’ve tried a couple of times to approach a certain NBA player to get him to say one sentence I can film (it’s a joke for my daughter, and only makes sense from him) but it’s just too creepy to jockey for position with the earnest kids and youngsters.

“Dad’s” chair: Absolutely. There is no downside to this. Well, almost none. I once jokingly told my then ten year old daughter to get out of “my” chair. She jokingly told me, “take a hike, baldy.”

Food behavior: This is one of the unmitigated blessings of aging. You by all means should cling to your food habits and even take advantage to develop new ones that you’ve mostly been too polite to reveal. You just have to sigh and say, “I know I’m old and set in my ways, but I really don’t like…”

Good luck. There is no reason to go gently into the gloaming, but neither should you deck yourself in glow sticks.

British Invasion– “A go”

A go:  Another example of a perfectly good expression whose reasonable American range and writ suffers from encroachment by British usage. It means a “turn,” “try,” or “attempt.” “A go” is welcome in American as an alternative to “try” or “attempt” in an example like, “okay, I’ll have a go at it.” “Have a go,” however, is not an acceptable American substitute for “take a turn.” It’s not this expression’s turn.

 

NB:

The British Invasion is when– unbidden and unneeded– explicitly British words and expressions infiltrate American public commentary and journalism. This is alarming because the resultant multiplier effect could cause an epidemic that infects ordinary Americans’ healthy vocabulary.

Although I strive for tolerance, for the purpose of this series of posts, my fundamental assumption is that American is better than, not just different from, British. This is– mainly, if not exclusively– because American is newer and made improvements to its dialect of origin. I do, however, confess to frequent unfair extrapolation from this arguably reasonable approach to almost wholesale– and borderline unfair– derision of British compared to American. I beg the reader’s forbearance for having fun with such a solemn topic. I’m just taking the mickey– or whatever it is Americans say.

Tapeworn

I don’t have patience for video links and almost always prefer to read something because I can read much faster than I can watch. I have come to realize, however, that I am a disappearing minority in that respect, even among my friends and family. They don’t read many or most of the many things I send or suggest to them, and I don’t watch many or most of the video links they send or suggest to me.

As much as it frustrates me, their approach is sustainable in daily life and, mine, perhaps, is not. Several of my preferred sports websites, for example, now automatically load video that I don’t want to watch. And they do it on almost every page I open. They have decided for me that video is my priority, even though I never declared such an allegiance, and even though it slows down everything else. Exasperated, I wrote one website to ask if I could set a preference to avoid video I had not summoned. I got a cheerful non-sequitur reply that, of course, I could stop any video that started to auto-play.

I am not “right” about my preference, but I confess that defaulting to video bothers me. I once read a fascinating science-oriented article in the New Yorker. It was very long, as they often are. I tried to get my kids to read it. Rolling his eyes, one of them called me over to his computer and said, “Dad, isn’t what you’re talking about the same as what’s in this video?” I watched the four- or five-minute video, and he was right. The video did an extremely good job of covering in five minutes what I spent well over half an hour reading.

While I still believe in the intrinsic value of reading, for many of us it has become complementary rather than prescriptive — perhaps in the same way that vinyl turntables have returned to supplement our reliance on digital music.