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The Citizen, 1999-10-13, Page 5THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 13, 1999. PAGE 5. Arthur Black How do you spell komik releef? Andrew Jackson, aside from being the seventh U.S. President, was also a bad speller. Once, while trying to decide whether the word he wanted was ‘constitution’ or ‘konstitooshun’, Jackson threw down his quill pen and roared, “It’s a damn poor mind that can think of only one way to spell a word!” Jackson was right. Bad spelling is no indication of low intelligence. Look at Farley Mowat. The man writes like a dream but he can’t spell worth a damn. I know - in a previous incarnation as a sub-editor, I got to edit one of his manuscripts. But for a fine writer like Mowat, there’s no shortage of drones to take care of messy details like spelling and punctuation. Some poor spellers aren’t so lucky. Take the tattooist who did a job on Joe Beahm last month. Beahm had come into Body Art World, a tattoo joint in Asbury Park, New Jersey, with a special request: he wanted a tattoo on his back ®1 International Scene By Raymond Canon Visiting vocabulary When I was in kindergarten we had a potpourri of activities. We had a teacher who stood arms akimbo near the exit of the classroom and said au revoir to each of us as we left. To us she was nothing less than tres belle; she never seemed to make a faux pas and she wore chic clothing which we considered the dernier cri, with foulards, but nothing decollete. She had travelled and filled us with stories of chateaux in France, polders in Holland, fjords in Norway and gondole in Italy. Her joie de vivre was infectuous and her life seldom filled with Schadenfreude. Ours, on the other hand, was a continual Sturm und Drang. I think back on all the teachers I had in the six countries in which I went to school. The good ones were au courant with their subject and taught with elan and panache, the bad ones with ennui. The latter taught ad nauseam in a monotonous fashion as if there were nothing of interest. They were au fond babysitters looking after a coterie of teenagers, or were simply enroute to retirement. Whether they were compos mentis remained unanswered. We were convinced that only a deus ex machina could get us out of their clutches. Fortunately such teachers did not render reductio ad absurdum or drive to get educated. Our periods of mental mal de mer were outnumbered by days when, mirabile dictu, we turned out competent work. Even I, who drew flak from the art teacher who wrote me off as the class enfant terrible, \ \ depicting a knife stabbing into his shoulder blade. Under that, he wanted the words “Why not ? Everybody else does.” “It was just something funny that I had in my mind,” says Beahm. Funnier than he knew. When the blood dried and the tattoo was visible, the legend beneath the knife read, in letters a quarter of an inch high: WHY NOT? EVERYBODY ELESE DOES Now, Joe Beahm is bad-mouthing the tattooist and the tattooist is suing Beahm for slander. Meanwhile, Joe Beahm is keeping his shirt on. Spelling turned out to be fairly critical in the streets of Hartford, Connecticut last week as well. Literally ‘in the streets’. You know those road-painting contractors who get to stencil white lines, arrows and traffic directions on city streets - signs like NO LEFT TURN or QUIET, HOSPITAL ZONE? Well, there’s one road painting contractor in West Hartford who might be looking for a new line of work. He’s the guy responsible for spray painting, all over town, in three-foot- managed to draw at least one chef d’oeuvre although the teacher saw it as something less than a tour de force and damned it with faint praise. I immediately relapsed into mediocrity and could hear the teacher muttering something about ex nihilo, nihil fit. But tempus fugit. We found ourselves in university. What a brouhaha! Trying to produce a magnum opus when we were confused, intimidated, insecure. But it was sauve qui peut; for many it turned into a Goetterdaemmerung of Wagnerian proportions. It was easy to believe we were no longer part of the hoi polloi; in truth we were of a different kind. The practice of dolce far niente was for some quite a la mode. These elitists acted as if they were always cognoscenti of everything but at the end of the year the university, with typical sang froid, said in effect: “Ciao amico” and rendered tjjem hors de combat. The rest of us sang Gaudeamus igitur and collected our degrees. The piece de resistance of my studies were sports. Hockey, for one, was great if I could avoid being given the coupe de grace by the opposition. Soccer was easier on me; it kept me on the qui vive and they both provided a physical alternative to mental study. As they used to say, mens Sana in corpora sano. At any rate I avoided being academically A Final Thought What’s going on in the inside shows on the outside. - Earl Nightingale high letters: SLOW DOWN SCOHOL ZONE Maybe I’m wrong - maybe the city will give him his road-painting job back - providing he signs up for a remedial spelling course at night school. The late comedian Peter Sellers had a low tolerance for bad spellers. When he received a request for “a singed, autographed photo­ graph” Sellers gleefully hauled out a cigarette lighter, burned the edges of an 8 by 10" glossy of himself and popped it in the mail. Two weeks later, he got another letter from the fan thanking him for the photograph, but wondering if he could trouble him for another, as “the one you sent is signed all around the edge.” Then there’s the story of the professor correcting an essay by a student who wrote about his holiday in Venezuela. The student kept writing the word ‘burrow’ instead of ‘burro’. The professor corrected it once. Twice. Three times. Finally, in exasperation, he wrote in the margin. “My dear sir: it is quite apparent that you do not know your ass from a hole in the ground.” kaput. Like Donner and Blitzen I delivered the goods to the illustrissimi professori when it counted and ended up ipso facto with the necessary degrees. With all the other economists, I could then say caeteris paribus every fourth sentence. I said adieu to academia, at least as a student. The real world was filled with an economic and social smorgesbord. We aspired to the haut monde without quite being sure how not to commit professional harikari. Some of our efforts took on kamikasi tendences, others convinced everybody we were totally gauche or loco or both. Now and again, however, our efforts showed signs of a certain savoir faire, a je ne sais quoi of maturity which were a sine qua non for the world of marriage and child-raising. But voila! C’est fini. If you have struggled to the end, you should realize what I am trying to do. Simply, to show you how many foreign words and expressions have crept into the English language at one time or another. There are 83 of them in the article. How many did you get? Letters Policy The Citizen welcomes letters to the editor. Letters must be signed and should include a daytime telephone number for the purpose of verification only. Letters that are not signed will not be printed. Submissions may be edited for length, clarity and content, using fair comment as our guideline. The Citizen reserves the right to refuse any letter on the basis of unfair bias, prejudice or inaccurate information. As well, letters can only be printed as space allows. Please keep your letters brief and concise. Moments to remember The days may come, the days may go, But still the hands of memory weave The blissful dreams of long ago. — George Cooper While shopping the other day, I saw an elderly woman. Lovely white hair done in tight little curls, she was a five foot sprite, quick stepping it through the store with admirable alacrity. As we passed, she glanced at me and smiled, and I was amazed to feel my heart warm. It took barely a second for me to realize that though it was a face unfamiliar, she was no stranger. Some subtlety, some nuance was reminiscent of my grandmother and in the brief instant that I became a child again I felt a fondness, a tenderness, for this unknown woman. Memory is an amazing thing. It can be playful, tricking us, conjuring images that over time take on very different proportions or meanings. Its sentimentality forgives us embellishments or rose-coloured glasses. Conversely, it can be constant, the only thing linking us to the past, to someone or something once so very dear. We will forever remember a face so cherished, affection given so generously, a love so treasured. I’m often fascinated by things that tweaked a certain memory or the feeling that a specific memory can arouse. For example, the scent of peonies plays back a rotogravure of wonderful moments in grandma’s garden. The fragrance is bittersweet as I find myself at once missing her, yet gladly revisiting her face and those summers. Or a certain laugh, heard from afar at a party will discomfit as my subconscious recalls it reminds me of someone best forgotten and I force the unwanted recollection back. A song, a saying, a voice can cause a thought to jump from its hiding place, then consequently, that thought pulls out an emotion, perhaps pleasant, perhaps not so. It is memory that keeps me a lithe and bouncy 16 when world-weariness stresses my achy joints. It is memory that enhances parenting skills, giving me confidence as I recall myself at various ages and how each situation turned out. It is memory that helps me to understand why people are who they are, as I look back to consider how life shaped me. It is interesting to think that each day is about creating and collecting a series of new memories. From conversations with co­ workers to chats with our children, from experiences to adventures, we file away moments, some which will be remembered for years to come, others which will only be remembered for a specific purpose, and still others that will be lost. Memories can restore us, sustain us, unite us. This past weekend my sister and I, while out running errands took her daughter-in-law on a guided tour of memory lane. We introduced her to aspects of our past to which neither of us had given much thought in recent years. Through shared recollections and some surprises we revived the bond of family and offered a few laughs. It was, like so many other days, a moment to remember.