Words that make me cringe
April 22, 2002 | 12:00am
This past month was crunch time for tens of thousands of Filipino kids trying to graduate from high school and college – which meant, in turn, a lemming-like march toward the term-paper factories that have sprouted around every campus. Desperation, laziness, and loose change can be a fatal combination when it comes to these situations, encouraging brazen and wholesale plagiarism, perpetrated by 16-year-olds with as much impunity as their dads buy and use pirated CDs.
As a teacher of English and department chairman, I’m constantly amazed by the persistence and by the number of plagiarism cases that come to my attention. It’s become something of a game for the kids, who probably read so little that they can’t possibly imagine that Sir or Ma’am would have come across the same piece they did, or who think so highly (or so poorly) of their own talents that they’d rather risk exposure and opprobrium copying someone’s paper than put in an honest week’s work into a project.
In my experience, it’s the smarter, rather than the weaker, student who’ll plagiarize. Successful plagiarism requires skill and nerve – something your typical plodder won’t have too much of. And just as typically, it’s unimaginativeness that proves the undoing of many a plagiarist – the inability to mask an author’s style, or to paraphrase an argument, or to put a patently lifted passage within quotation marks.
I always tell the kids: better a grade of 3.0 or C under your own name than a 1.0 or an A under somebody else’s. These things have a way of catching up with you, when you least expect them.
This year, it wasn’t really plagiarism that gave me grief as much as the flood of requests from students (and their parents) for help with their homework – especially when the homework had something to do with stories and poems written by a certain Jose Dalisay. I would receive an e-mail explaining how distraught and desperate the student was because of the lateness of the hour (oddly enough, I never get such requests at the start of the semester), telling me how their teacher had chosen my work ("Of all the lousy poems and stories in the whole wide world!" I could hear some of them muttering) for them to report on, and insinuating that it was my bloody fault their lives were now horribly complicated and their futures compromised by this assignment – so could I acknowledge my responsibility and help them out by explaining exactly what my poem or story meant? (To be fair, many requests I receive are much more nicely put – with, however, the same practical end.)
I’ve said this before, but I apparently have to say it again: thanks for reading my work (I hope it was worth your while), and I don’t mean to be mean, but I really don’t think it’s part of my job to explain, in high-school prose, what I already tried to explain about life and the world and the solar system in the story or the poem. That’s the critic’s task – and the student’s homework. The author’s job is to interpret the world; the critic’s is to interpret the author’s interpretation (a separate skill that not many authors are very good at, especially when it comes to their own work). The author will have his or her own special (or, as we say in school, "privileged") reading of his or her own work – but it will just be one of many, and it shouldn’t loom over the others as the one true interpretation of the work.
Let me put this another way: in contemporary literary theory, authors don’t have any proprietary rights to what their works might mean. It’s your reading, your way of making sense of the words, that counts. Shakespeare can’t raise his hand from the grave to point a finger at, say, theater director Anton Juan to tell him that "That’s not what I meant!"
Well, you might say, why don’t we just flush contemporary literary theory down the toilet and why don’t you just be kind enough to help me pass this silly course and just bloody tell me what was on your mind when you wrote this stupid poem?
Hmmm – now, I say, since you put it so nicely, maybe I will tell you that this story was inspired by the death of my neighbor’s cat as a result of the chocolate bar I tossed out the window when I read an article in the Reader’s Digest about a man in Guyana who lost three of his fingers and his hearing in both ears after years of munching on cacao beans while contemplating the frequency of tidal surges in late April. Chocolate, as you know, is sheer poison to felines... I hope that helped!
To summarize this lesson: rather than depend on the kindness (or meanness) of authors, take the trouble of grappling with the text of the piece, word by magical word, phrase by mysterious phrase. Any sense you make of it will still be more precious, educationally, than anything the author himself or herself can tell you.
I had a friend once who screamed every time she heard the word "nougat." (If you don’t know what a nougat is, it’s "a confection made from a sugar or honey paste into which nuts are mixed," according to my on-board dictionary.) My friend didn’t object to the candy itself – which I remember munching on in my grade-school days, chewy and nutty, but a good break from chocolate fudge – but to the sound of the word, which was decidedly unpoetic. Poetry, as you know, has traditionally thrived on the kind of sounds you hear in words like "silver" and "splendor" (remember how "The splendor falls / on castle walls"?). I must admit I have yet to come across a poem with the word "nougat" in it, although I wouldn’t put it past a wizard of wit like Ogden Nash to have penned one.
I have my own hate-word – no, not "egregious," which somebody else already picked out before me, nor "wholistic," which would kill civil society and put New Age gurus out to pasture if I took the word out of circulation – but rather this lexical monstrosity you won’t even find in any sensible dictionary: "multiawarded." It’s sometimes spelled with a hyphen, but does it really matter? It’s still ugly as hell, one awful mistake ("awarded" – what, as in "She’s an awarded actress"?) compounded by a stab at something vaguely scientific ("multi" – as in "multimedia"). It means well, and I don’t think any of us would really mind being multiawarded, if truth be told. But I still cringe every time I hear it, maybe because I can’t ever imagine love as a multi-splendored thing.
The University Council of the University of the Philippines is a unique and sometimes funny institution, the general assembly of all of UP Diliman’s tenured professors which meets several times a year to discuss and debate matters academic and not-so-academic. UC meetings are almost always impassioned affairs, replete with high drama and comic relief, with the issues on the agenda ranging from intellectual dishonesty and moral turpitude to professorial grammar and classroom fashions. The UC can be solomonically stern in making up its mind one meeting, only to be as flighty as a freshman in unmaking that same decision the next.
Last week’s meeting promised to be a killer marathon, with almost a ream of curricular proposals up for discussion. But the UC was in a generous mood, reserving comment for all but the thorniest issues – one of which turned out to be the wording of the title of a new general-education course proposed by the Institute of Physics, "Physics and Astronomy for Pedestrians." It was my departmental colleague, poet and classics professor Jimmy Abad, who threw the first gauntlet, declaring the word "pedestrian" to be linguistically unfortunate; "laymen" he said, might have been a better alternative, but for its clerical undertones.
Other professors of English chimed in, citing "pedestrian’s pejorative connotations (i.e., "dull" and "undistinguished"); snickers crossed the aisles when someone mentioned "streetwalkers," hopefully in jest. Theater director Anton Juan defended "pedestrian," arguing that its meaning was being constructed by its proponents, who deserved the benefit of the doubt. That drew another spirited round of attacks. "What’s wrong with ‘pedestrians’?" cried the poor director of the Institute of Physics, the many-splendored Dr. Caesar Saloma, who only wanted to bring physics and astronomy down to street level, in what was more helpfully described as a "walk-through" course for freshmen and sophomores.
Finally I could no longer resist, and plunged headlong into the fray. I took the side of Dr. Saloma, arguing that "This council is where these meanings are negotiated, and if that’s what the physics people say it means to them, then like it or not, that’s what it is. Besides, there’s a certain logic to the idea, with the stars up there and us pedestrians down here." That more or less ended the debate, and we moved on to less esoteric and frankly less entertaining things.
Maybe I should have suggested "Physics and Astronomy for Earth-Walkers," but I guess "pedestrians" will have to do for now – or at least until the next UC meeting.
Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com.
As a teacher of English and department chairman, I’m constantly amazed by the persistence and by the number of plagiarism cases that come to my attention. It’s become something of a game for the kids, who probably read so little that they can’t possibly imagine that Sir or Ma’am would have come across the same piece they did, or who think so highly (or so poorly) of their own talents that they’d rather risk exposure and opprobrium copying someone’s paper than put in an honest week’s work into a project.
In my experience, it’s the smarter, rather than the weaker, student who’ll plagiarize. Successful plagiarism requires skill and nerve – something your typical plodder won’t have too much of. And just as typically, it’s unimaginativeness that proves the undoing of many a plagiarist – the inability to mask an author’s style, or to paraphrase an argument, or to put a patently lifted passage within quotation marks.
I always tell the kids: better a grade of 3.0 or C under your own name than a 1.0 or an A under somebody else’s. These things have a way of catching up with you, when you least expect them.
This year, it wasn’t really plagiarism that gave me grief as much as the flood of requests from students (and their parents) for help with their homework – especially when the homework had something to do with stories and poems written by a certain Jose Dalisay. I would receive an e-mail explaining how distraught and desperate the student was because of the lateness of the hour (oddly enough, I never get such requests at the start of the semester), telling me how their teacher had chosen my work ("Of all the lousy poems and stories in the whole wide world!" I could hear some of them muttering) for them to report on, and insinuating that it was my bloody fault their lives were now horribly complicated and their futures compromised by this assignment – so could I acknowledge my responsibility and help them out by explaining exactly what my poem or story meant? (To be fair, many requests I receive are much more nicely put – with, however, the same practical end.)
I’ve said this before, but I apparently have to say it again: thanks for reading my work (I hope it was worth your while), and I don’t mean to be mean, but I really don’t think it’s part of my job to explain, in high-school prose, what I already tried to explain about life and the world and the solar system in the story or the poem. That’s the critic’s task – and the student’s homework. The author’s job is to interpret the world; the critic’s is to interpret the author’s interpretation (a separate skill that not many authors are very good at, especially when it comes to their own work). The author will have his or her own special (or, as we say in school, "privileged") reading of his or her own work – but it will just be one of many, and it shouldn’t loom over the others as the one true interpretation of the work.
Let me put this another way: in contemporary literary theory, authors don’t have any proprietary rights to what their works might mean. It’s your reading, your way of making sense of the words, that counts. Shakespeare can’t raise his hand from the grave to point a finger at, say, theater director Anton Juan to tell him that "That’s not what I meant!"
Well, you might say, why don’t we just flush contemporary literary theory down the toilet and why don’t you just be kind enough to help me pass this silly course and just bloody tell me what was on your mind when you wrote this stupid poem?
Hmmm – now, I say, since you put it so nicely, maybe I will tell you that this story was inspired by the death of my neighbor’s cat as a result of the chocolate bar I tossed out the window when I read an article in the Reader’s Digest about a man in Guyana who lost three of his fingers and his hearing in both ears after years of munching on cacao beans while contemplating the frequency of tidal surges in late April. Chocolate, as you know, is sheer poison to felines... I hope that helped!
To summarize this lesson: rather than depend on the kindness (or meanness) of authors, take the trouble of grappling with the text of the piece, word by magical word, phrase by mysterious phrase. Any sense you make of it will still be more precious, educationally, than anything the author himself or herself can tell you.
I have my own hate-word – no, not "egregious," which somebody else already picked out before me, nor "wholistic," which would kill civil society and put New Age gurus out to pasture if I took the word out of circulation – but rather this lexical monstrosity you won’t even find in any sensible dictionary: "multiawarded." It’s sometimes spelled with a hyphen, but does it really matter? It’s still ugly as hell, one awful mistake ("awarded" – what, as in "She’s an awarded actress"?) compounded by a stab at something vaguely scientific ("multi" – as in "multimedia"). It means well, and I don’t think any of us would really mind being multiawarded, if truth be told. But I still cringe every time I hear it, maybe because I can’t ever imagine love as a multi-splendored thing.
Last week’s meeting promised to be a killer marathon, with almost a ream of curricular proposals up for discussion. But the UC was in a generous mood, reserving comment for all but the thorniest issues – one of which turned out to be the wording of the title of a new general-education course proposed by the Institute of Physics, "Physics and Astronomy for Pedestrians." It was my departmental colleague, poet and classics professor Jimmy Abad, who threw the first gauntlet, declaring the word "pedestrian" to be linguistically unfortunate; "laymen" he said, might have been a better alternative, but for its clerical undertones.
Other professors of English chimed in, citing "pedestrian’s pejorative connotations (i.e., "dull" and "undistinguished"); snickers crossed the aisles when someone mentioned "streetwalkers," hopefully in jest. Theater director Anton Juan defended "pedestrian," arguing that its meaning was being constructed by its proponents, who deserved the benefit of the doubt. That drew another spirited round of attacks. "What’s wrong with ‘pedestrians’?" cried the poor director of the Institute of Physics, the many-splendored Dr. Caesar Saloma, who only wanted to bring physics and astronomy down to street level, in what was more helpfully described as a "walk-through" course for freshmen and sophomores.
Finally I could no longer resist, and plunged headlong into the fray. I took the side of Dr. Saloma, arguing that "This council is where these meanings are negotiated, and if that’s what the physics people say it means to them, then like it or not, that’s what it is. Besides, there’s a certain logic to the idea, with the stars up there and us pedestrians down here." That more or less ended the debate, and we moved on to less esoteric and frankly less entertaining things.
Maybe I should have suggested "Physics and Astronomy for Earth-Walkers," but I guess "pedestrians" will have to do for now – or at least until the next UC meeting.
BrandSpace Articles
<
>
