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epitome of incomprehensibility
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In my latest creative writing class, the oldest student expressed a worry: "Was the expression I used before offensive to Canadians? The one with the word for breaking wind...?"
I laughed. "Do you mean 'fart'?"
"Ye-es...I used the expression 'a fart in a whirlwind' when I was talking about people's individual actions to prevent global warming, not that I meant to be cynical either, only that it's easy to think that... It's just that, since Janet was saying how Canadians were well-spoken, I worried that this word for breaking wind might be offensive to Canadians..."
I shook my head. My video-image self smiled. "No, not at all. Not offensive. Just a bit childish..."
Joan: "Oh, well, yes, I suppose it's childish."
Me, having put my proverbial foot in my mouth: "No, no, I mean the word itself...I like the expression..."
Liz, who'd had her video off, reappeared to say, "Oh yeah, no, I'm not offended at all. But I'm flattered at being 'well-spoken'!"
...
Something like this.
It was in the last class_on_humour_and_surprise, an online cross-border venture with four participants:
1) The teacher Janet, originally born in the States, used to live in Montreal and is now in Colorado
2) Joan lives in Colorado
3) Liz lives in Montreal
4) I live in Montreal
...
So I'm Canadian, but hardly "well-spoken." Too often, I talk like that other famous Presbyterian with ADHD - albeit with less interest in annexing Greenland. (Slightly fanciful armchair diagnosis: he has it, but so did James_Joyce; ADHD doesn't make you inherently better or worse.)
Anyway. As I try to get my ideas out, I interrupt sentences with other sentences, repeat words, and, yes, sound childish.
Lately, I keep catching myself saying "super" instead of "very" - as in, "It's not super cold." This is kid-coded and perhaps redolent of the 1990s. Not that this sort of thing actually *matters* - I just worry that I'll sound immature, outdated, poor, stupid...or all four at once.
Where, oh class self-consciousness, is thy victory? Where, oh "millennial cringe," thy sting?
...Maybe it's in the pre- and post-millennial cringe, like the Gen X setting of Judgment_Day in Left_Behind: do we judge it as if at an apocalypse_literature_conference, detachedly snobby?
Yes...but fuck it. My education is another fart in a whirlwind. We're all naked, vulnerable, flatulent humans underneath the clothes of culture.
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