Feature creep and the contemporary syllabus

From Paula Walsey's "The Syllabus Becomes a Repository of Legalese," in The Chronicle of Higher Education (March 14, 2008):

"[T]he syllabus gets longer and longer each time students think up something new that you wouldn't necessarily want them doing," says Susan R. Boettcher, an assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.

More than a third of her nine-page syllabus for a course on the Reformation is taken up by explanations of her policies on attendance, laptop usage, and how to round grades, and her availability to write letters of recommendation.

Her detailed policy on scholastic dishonesty includes a clause stating that "the rules of academic honesty also apply to extra credit." It was an addition that she made after a judicial board overturned her recommendation that a student fail her course for plagiarizing an extra-credit paper. Her syllabus had not explicitly stated that students could fail for cheating on extra-credit projects.

I'm both impressed and horrified by the nerve of the student who challenged Professor Boettcher's decision. As I point out when I teach the Inferno, plagiarists would likely end up in the tenth bolgia of the eight circle of Dante's hell, reserved for falsifiers (alchemists, counterfeiters, perjurers, impersonators), those who tamper with the integrity of things, words, and persons.

No link: most items in the Chronicle are available only to subscribers. But here's Wikipedia's article on creeping featurism.

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In search of lost sound

Milk bottles, steam engines, typewriters: these and other sounds of the past are available from Marnix Koolhaas' Library of Vanished Sounds (aka the Museum of Lost Sounds).

Larry David on the red phone

["The Lefty Call," Curb Your Enthusiasm (2007).]

Larry David has strong feelings about who should be answering the red phone:

On the Red Phone (Huffington Post)

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Aqua Velva

From a television commercial:

"Through the years, many things pass from father to son, like Aqua Velva After Shave."

En mi casa, it's not Aqua Velva that has passed from father to son; it's a beard. Across generations, we heed the anonymous wisdom of these words (from 1879!):

Those who shave do well; but those who do not do better. If nature intended for men to shave, she would not have been so lavish in providing them with beards, and it is best for men not to shave at all, for nothing adds to the beauty of man so much as a full flowing beard.

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Do-over

I'm amused to find do-over as a recurring term in discussion of the Florida and Michigan Democratic primaries. From House Democratic leader Dan Gelber, a sentence that could have come from The Onion: "I think we have to do a do-over."

Do-over is likely to be familiar to any veteran of schoolyard games. That at least is the context in which I'm familiar with the term: the world of odds and evens and two out of three and choosing up sides. Any matter of reasonable or unreasonable dispute could be decided by a do-over: whether the ball was out of bounds, whether the dribbler was traveling, whether the runner was over the goal line when tagged. I must have said and heard do-over hundreds of times as a kid, in a number of variations:

"That's a do-over!"

"We gotta do that over!"

"No way! Do-over!"

The Oxford English Dictionary doesn't contain do-over — yet.

Inept political metaphor of the day

From Joe Klein, writing for Time:

On the Friday before her resurrection, Hillary Clinton seemed exhausted, played out.

Yes, resurrection can mean "resurgence, revivial"; it need not refer to the dead rising. But the paragraph in which this sentence appears describes the "funereal" mood on a Clinton campaign plane, which strongly suggests the primary meaning of resurrection, whatever the writer's intent. So the metaphor fails: if the mood is "funereal" and there's a resurrection to come, you're dead, not "exhausted, played out."

But worse: for a thinking reader, theist or non-theist, there's something grotesque in the very idea of a sentence about the Friday before a politician's resurrection.

As the sign said, THINK.

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Of prongs and pillars

Once you begin reading and listening for inept political metaphor, it's everywhere. From a Wolf Blitzer blog post:

For years, Republicans have stressed a three-pronged platform in trying to win votes.

What would a three-pronged — or even one- or two-pronged — platform look like? Something designed by Dalí, I suppose.

Three sentences later, the prongs turn into pillars. If you want a good old dying metaphor, you need planks.

Come on, Wolf. As the IBM sign said, THINK, at least a little bit.

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Times reporter on metaphorical spree

It's difficult not to suspect an element of parody in New York Times writer Patrick Healy's article on last night's primaries. Watch the metaphors change from sentence to sentence — and within sentences! George Orwell's comment on dying metaphors (which Stefan Hagemann cited in relation to the so-called "kitchen sink" strategy) is again apposite:

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s victories in Ohio and Texas on Tuesday night not only shook off the vapors of impending defeat, but also showed that — in spite of his delegate lead — Senator Barack Obama was still losing to her in the big states.

Those two states were the battlegrounds where Mr. Obama was going to bury the last opponent to his history-making nomination, finally delivering on his message of hope while dashing the hopes of a Clinton presidential dynasty.

Yet then the excited, divided American electorate weighed in once more, throwing Mrs. Clinton the sort of political lifeline that New Hampshire did in early January after her third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses.

For Mrs. Clinton, the battle ahead is not so much against Mr. Obama as it is against a Democratic Party establishment that had once been ready to coalesce behind her but has been drifting toward Mr. Obama. The party wants a standard-bearer now to wage the war against the newly minted leader of the Republicans, Senator John McCain, who enjoys a head start with every day that the Democrats lack a nominee of their own.

The vapors: Hillary Clinton as 19th-century lady.

Battlegrounds: war.

Burying the last opponent: evidently a war metaphor, but one doesn't bury the enemy dead in wartime. Hit job might be a better metaphor here — killing one's enemy and burying the body.

Finally delivering, while dashing dynastic hopes: a courier service that also delivers violent blows to abstractions. Note that this courier service makes deliveries to battlegrounds.

Weighing in: boxing.

Lifeline: a rescue at sea (after a third-place finish).

Coalescing, drifting: matter in primordial space?

Standard-bearer: war (but a military leader wouldn't be bearing the standard).

Newly minted: coinage.

A head start: it's a race.

Yes, it's still a race after all.

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El Pico key ring

Reading Design Observer's occasional excerpts from Taking Things Seriously: 75 Objects with Unexpected Significance prompts me to write about this now-broken key ring. My friend Aldo Carrasco gave it to me in the 1980s in recognition of my taste for Cuban coffee. My guess is that the key ring was a giveaway for bodega and supermarket customers. I would like to think that the unintended Warholian overtones were not lost on us, but they were. El Pico was just a joke between friends.

Over many years, I kept this key ring in a box with various objects — foreign coins, pencils, a miniature Mona Lisa from an old professor's office. At some point in the late 20th century (how I love saying that), I decided that I would stop saving the key ring and simply use it, in memory of Aldo, who had died in 1986.

Yesterday, when I reached to open the front door and leave the house, my keys fell to the floor and I found myself holding nothing more than a coffee can: the plastic that tethered ring to can had split. I can't imagine a repair that would be more than temporary, and I can imagine keys falling in less forgiving circumstances. So my keys are still on the key ring my friend gave me, but El Pico now sits on my desk.

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Mac user experience

From Humanized, a blog post by Atul Varma on what it's like to plug a USB keyboard and USB mouse into a Windows machine and a Mac. Here's Windows:

Each wizard required 3 clicks to get through. I had to go through 8 wizards in all, so that's a grand total of twenty-four clicks required to unplug my keyboard and mouse from one side of my computer and plug them into the other side. I'm not actually installing brand-new hardware here.

Now the Mac:

The first time I had to plug this keyboard and mouse into my Mac, I was floored. In the best-case scenario, I expected it to think for a second or two and then give me a reasonably unintrusive message informing me that I could use my USB mouse and keyboard. That would have been pretty humane.

But it did one better.

The Mac didn't tell me anything, because my mouse and keyboard just worked the moment I plugged them in. When you plug in a power cable or a pair of headphones into a computer, you don't get some kind of confirmation message from your operating system, because it's obviously supposed to just work — why should plugging in a USB keyboard and mouse be any different?

I'm planning to read these paragraphs aloud the next time I'm waiting (and waiting, and waiting) for a classroom Windows computer to detect my USB flash drive and tell me that it's ready to use.