As much as I love fall, this year’s is proving to be a bit more difficult than normal. You see, Sarcasmo is a senior in high school this year and that means it’s college application time.

Oh, yeah. You can bet that’s going well.

The problem, you see, is that Sarcasmo is like a lot of typical [...]]]> by Richard

As much as I love fall, this year’s is proving to be a bit more difficult than normal. You see, Sarcasmo is a senior in high school this year and that means it’s college application time.

Oh, yeah. You can bet that’s going well.

The problem, you see, is that Sarcasmo is like a lot of typical young dudes. That is, he’d like to do the least amount possible. For anything. Which means when he sees the word optional in a college application form, he thinks that means it’s actually optional. Instead of a one-word euphemism for “You must do this or you have no chance whatsoever of ever actually attempting to darken our doors, you scum.”

I might be overstating the case there. Slightly. But not by much.

The good news is that most colleges accept — nay, encourage — you to apply online. Those online applications are great, even if only for one reason: you don’t need to use a bottle of white out per page.

Back in the dark ages when I was preparing my college applications, I had to hand write or type every single bit. Which meant when I did make mistakes, and I did make mistakes, I had to either start over with a brand-new application, filling in all the stuff I’d already filled in, or I had to whip out the white out. Neither of which option was all that great.

Being a young dude, I compensated by only applying to two colleges. Fortunately, it was an earlier age and you could actually get into an out-of-state college fairly easily and, frankly, I got lucky.

Sarcasmo doesn’t have that first out and we can’t rely on the second.

Which makes working with him on all those short answers all the more fun. One leading question consisted of “My friends would be surprised if they knew what about me?” He had 250 words for his response. His answer, before I got out the whip and the chair, was nine words, including “My friends would be surprised if. . . ”

And the good news is I get to do this again next year when it’s Zippy the Monkey Boy’s turn in the barrel.

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The Oxford English Dictionary is the gold standard for dictionaries. This is the one you always found in some remote corner of the library, open on its own wooden stand. It had to have its own stand because it was far too big to ever fit on one of those shelves. Puny shelves, leave Hulk OED [...]]]> by Richard

The Oxford English Dictionary is the gold standard for dictionaries. This is the one you always found in some remote corner of the library, open on its own wooden stand. It had to have its own stand because it was far too big to ever fit on one of those shelves. Puny shelves, leave Hulk OED smash! And that’s the abridged version.

Anyway, that might all be changing with the next edition of the OED.

The publisher of the complete Oxford English Dictionary says the OED may be the next printed work to give up on paper and go completely digital.

The Oxford University Press said recently it may not have enough market demand to publish a hardcover version of the third edition of the multivolume OED, according to anAssociated Press report. The Oxford University Press would instead focus on selling subscriptions to the OED’s online version.

Of course, that’s not really a pressing concern since they’ve been working on the latest version, the third edition, since 1989 and still haven’t gotten past rococoesque. That’s the problem with creating a dictionary for a living language, words keep getting added all the time. I’m pretty sure an Oxford Latin Dictionary would be pretty easy to whip up.

The OED is widely considered to be the preeminent authority on the English language, and has been available in print since 1884. The second edition of the complete OED was published in 1989 as a 20-volume hardcover set. The OED contains more than 21,000 pages detailing word pronunciation, history, usage, and spellings. The set sells for about $1300 on Amazon and weighs 137.72 pounds.

Which goes a long way toward explaining why people want to access the OED website instead of toting around their huge dictionary set. Still, I imagine that much information must take up a lot of disc space as well. Or not.

The entire text of the OED’s second edition takes up just 540 megabytes of digital storage space. That means you would need just three-quarters the storage capacity of a typical blank CD to store all of the current OED’s 291, 500 entries.

Guess I won’t need to clear out my hard drive any time soon. However, I think it’s a pretty nifty indicator of where we, as a society, are heading, and that’s toward pixels and away from pages.

Just think. Come some time pretty soon, your little dudes and dudettes will be able to have the entire OED in the palm of their hand. And you’ll have another tired story about “When I was a little dude, we had to hump 137 pounds of dictionary to school every day. . . “

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With school all started up again, the folks at Beloit College have come out with their annual mindset list. No, it’s got nothing to do with yoga, transcendental meditation or psychics. Basically, it’s a list of stuff designed to make sure their professors don’t go around dropping outdated pop cultural references in class that their [...]]]> by Richard

With school all started up again, the folks at Beloit College have come out with their annual mindset list. No, it’s got nothing to do with yoga, transcendental meditation or psychics. Basically, it’s a list of stuff designed to make sure their professors don’t go around dropping outdated pop cultural references in class that their students wouldn’t understand.

Like, gag me with a spoon, you know?

It’s easy to make fun of out-of-touch professors who can’t keep up with the zeitgeist (German for spirit of the times). In fact, it’s so easy, I’m not even going to get into the silliness of making this list so the professors can pretend to be up to date. Let’s just look at the list itself. That’s easy to make fun of.

This list is made with the class of 2014 in mind. That is, the kids who are entering college this year, which means most of them will have been born in 1992. Whoa. I just realized. That’s the year before Sarcasmo made his first sarcastic comment. (a snarky, sideways look. She Who Must Sometimes Misremember Because She Was Under Anesthetic disagrees, but I’m sure I saw it when I was giving him his first diaper change and he peed on me.)

Anyway. The list.

No. 1 shows us that Few in the class know how to write in cursive. I’m not so sure about this. Even Hyper Lad, who’ll be in the class of 2021, knows how to write in cursive. He doesn’t like it, and all three little dudes confess ignorance about how to read cursive, but they do know how to write it. I’m not even going to comment on the inherent contradiction there. Too silly.

Picking purely at random and not because I can think of a good joke for it: No. 12: Clint Eastwood is better known as a sensitive director than as Dirty Harry. Go ahead, make my loving and tender comment. You know, it just doesn’t have the same resonance, does it?

No. 28. They’ve never recognized that pointing to their wrists was a request for the time of day. Now this one I’ll go with, no question. None of the three little dudes wears a watch. Not only that, but I have to work with them to get them to be able to read my analog watch. They’ve got cell phones with time displays on them. So do I and, I’m sure, most of you. It’s just I feel, well, naked without a watch, I’ve been wearing one so long. Strange to think that in 20 years, the watch will be seen as a trite antique, something only the very old wear. Or maybe as jewelry. I think I’ll be selling my Seiko stock right about now.

Now, this last one really frosts me. No. 74. They’ve always been able to blast off with the Sci-Fi (SYFY) Channel. You young punks don’t know how good you’ve got it. Why I had to search all over to find quality entertainment like Mansquito and all you’ve got to do is flip on the TV. Young punks.

Go ahead and check out the whole thing at http://www.beloit.edu/mindset/2014.php

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