writinginthewild.com

The New Oxford American dictionary has a knack for making astute choices for their word of the year, perhaps because, at some level, they are outsiders. This year they’ve picked “unfriend” as their top pick; their list includes several other technology words. I am not sure about ‘hashtag’ (I don’t tweet) but I think ‘sexting’ and ‘zombie bank’ are wonderfully evocative of our current zeitgeist.

I think the list of Obama words (Obamanoics, etc.) is banal; this started with Reagan and it no longer signifies. The list of political words is telling (including ‘zombie bank’) and more telling still is the wacky right-wing comments debate. Even here, in the most conservative and traditional of institutions, they found a liberal bias. Their beef lies in the choice of “teabagger” and “birther.”

What’s fascinating is that these writers have almost no sense of qualitative (much less quantitative) research. If these words are picked, the commenters imply, it has to be politics, and if they are picking only words that refer to the right wing, then it must be evidence of bias. The lexicographers must be ignoring left wing slang, perhaps because they would find it embarrassing.

These commenters are not embarrassed about their prejudices. “So much for scholarship,” Keith Smith, says, “Teabagger” is a slang sexual term perpetuated by openly gay correspondent Anderson Cooper of CNN.” Of course, as another writer noted, this term was first widely used by Fox News and other right wing writers, apparently unaware of the sexual connotation. That’s what was so funny.

Universities tend to have a pretty benign if elitist image. That’s particularly true for the 2/3′s or so of the U.S. who don’t have college degrees. Too often people with degrees are grossly sentimental; perfect fodder for football programs and alumni fund drives. If you work at a university, especially if you are a teacher or graduate student, your attitude can shift dramatically.

The current GEO strike is a case in point. The Graduate Employee Organization’s (GEO) decision to strike might seem frivolous or even reckless to anyone unfamiliar with the way they have historically been treated by the University of Illinois. But sometimes paranoia is justified. The UI stalled the graduate student union in court for more than a decade.

Now, apparently, they’ve refused to guarantee a tuition waiver. That would worry me too, given the current budget impasse in Illinois. As usual, though, the University wants what they inevitably call flexibility. In other words, they want to be able to make teachers pay for their jobs (through tuition) if (in their view) circumstances warrant. It’s not an idle threat.

I paid for my job at UT Austin in exactly this way while I was a graduate student. When it comes to what it considers its own interests, especially finances, universities have proven themselves to be very untrustworthy partners. GEO needs to stick to its guns, or the rest of us are going to feel the repercussions. I hope students and professors will respect the pickets.