Team spirit

You might have gathered that I’m not much of a sports fan. I’m vaguely aware that there are events that purport to be athletic endeavors around town, but in my opinion, once “sportsmanship” left the field, they should be called what they are. Which is a bunch of over-hyped egotists pumped-up on performance-enhancing substances engaging in activities that fleece the public, first in the granting of ridiculous tax favors and building of free facilities and then in the wildly over-priced ticket charges.

And that’s before the traffic jams.

Basically, whether it’s baseball, football, basketball or hockey, we’re just talking about another incarnation of corporate welfare.

Given that premise, I might be forgiven for getting confused by logos I encountered when I arrived at the District They Call Columbia earlier this year.

What happened was that I went into a Harris Teeter, saw this logo, and wondered, “Do they have a Walgreen’s [pharmacy] in this store?”

Because, look—grocery stores have over-priced and over-hyped coffee-like-substance chains, and banks and whatnot, so there might be a Walgreen’s…

Only it turned out that logo represented the local baseball team, the Washington Nationals.

But before you slap me upside the head, here’s the actual Walgreen’s logo:

So—an easy mistake.

Back in the very early years of this century in London, my bus route home from a Saturday morning wandering around the Portobello Road market or being a culture vulture at one of the museums took me past Chelsea Football Club. I was watching fans converging on the stadium one day, wearing shirts proclaiming their team support. Viz.:

(Apparently these are now collector’s items, ergo the eBay-worthy pix. Sorry.)

Here’s what I thought: “Man, that Autoglass team really has a lot of fans here.”

Well, look—when the corporate sponsor has bigger lettering than the team logo, what am I supposed to think?

I twigged to the situation at some point before I got home, and then mentioned it to a couple of colleagues on the Monday. They told me I was pitiful.

Well, fair enough. But in this regard, I’m with Sherlock Holmes: my brain does not need to be cluttered up with identifying specific athletic (ish) teams. What I care about is knowing when there’s a game on so I can take alternate routes to where I want to go.

The scary season

I was in Target the other day, and I think we’ve jumped the Halloween shark with this:

I mean—why not just hand out baby carrots and tofu?

Semper fi

Here’s a story that totally messes with the narrative put forward by the Republican presidential candidate: an Iraqi refugee, a woman, who is serving in the very military that he dodged five times in his youth.

Amanda H. Issa first encountered Marines as a child in Mosul, where she admired all the qualities that the candidate does not possess: discipline, sacrifice, comradeship, skill… So after a period in a refugee camp in Turkey, she and her family came to this country in 2011, settling in Michigan. Since then she’s graduated from high school and junior college, and joined the Marines she so admired as a child.

Ironically, during her bootcamp training at Parris Island earlier this year, Issa suffered a foot injury on a conditioning hike. It was so bad that USMC doctors told her she could be separated from the service. Issa refused to consider that and was graduated as PFC last month. Unlike the candidate, who used bone spurs to get his multiple deferments from the draft.

And she’s the kind of person that buffoon and his followers would like to exclude from our country.

Layer upon layer of meaning and information

Most of the women-in-tech list-servs I’m on have a good number of members who do not speak English as a first language. So I tend to cut them some slack when their grammar, punctuation and spelling aren’t publisher-ready.

But there was a (thankfully) short thread last week on Ada’s List (as in Ada Lovelace) in which the OP pointed out that the plural of a noun is formed by adding an “s”, not an apostrophe plus an “s”.

A lot of posters begin their emails with “Hello lovely Ada’s”. Apparently the missing comma of direct address doesn’t bother the OP. And ignore the fact that the list itself shows up in the sender’s block as “Adas List”, not “Ada’s List”.

Fair enough.

But someone who describes herself as “the pivot point between techs, designers, commercial and brand objectives, and user groups for startups” decided to weigh in. (Both OP & Ms. Pivot appear to be native English speakers, from England, for what it’s worth.) And let me just say that when someone chooses this kind of language as her face-on-the-world, you know you're in the presence of a major-league pisher.

Well.

I dunno, but it seems to me that if you’re going to attempt to, well, make a point about language, it would help if you refrained from word salad sentences, like that third graf. I mean—this is the kind of thing you might expect to overhear after watching an avant-garde one-act play off-off-Broadway, while standing amongst the vapers.

Also, in commenting on clarity of expression, which is clouded when people misuse contractions, your point is somewhat vitiated when you use the contraction of “it is” when what you probably meant was the possessive “its”. Just sayin’.

(I wonder if her shortening of communications in the last graf is ironic, given that it appears in a sentence where she proclaims that written communications should be “quite formal”? Perhaps she’s inviting us to explore her layer upon layer of meaning and information?)

I’m letting the typo on abbreviations slide; Lord knows my fingers don’t always cooperate with my brain. But I do find it interesting that she doesn’t seem to know the difference between abbreviations and contractions. An abbreviation, generally speaking, is a shortened form of a word (Dr. for Doctor, or lb. for pound [technically, a shortening of the Latin libra]), while a contraction represents the omission of one or more letters from a word or phrase by replacing it/them with the apostrophe (can’t for cannot or they’re for they are). Consequently, her pontification on “authentic patterns of speech” cracks me up.

As does referring to the “abbreviated” original phrase as its “full name” and then saying that however you want to spell stuff helps “provoke a deeply personal and genuine discourse”.

Well, at least—I think that’s what she’s saying. But truthfully, I’ll be blowed if I really understand her finely nuanced informal conversation (or, wait: it’s written, so does that make it formal?) and its constantly changing vernacular.

And I’m betting that the women on the list from Ghana, India, Colombia and Poland are with me on this.

Gratitude Monday: Days of Awe

Jews around the world gathered with families and friends at sundown last night to welcome in the year 5777. Rosh Hashanah begins with the call of the shofar at a synagogue service, and continues with a meal that traditionally includes a round challah (symbolizing the circle of life) and apples dipped in honey (for a sweet year). 

(I love the way food is fully integrated into religious observation.) 

It also marks the ten Days of Awe, when Jews reflect upon the past year and consider what they might have done better. The Days end with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when Jews acknowledge the wrongs of the previous year and ask forgiveness—from both the person(s) they’ve wronged and from God.

As I’ve written before, I think it’s a custom that pretty much everyone could benefit from. Most Christians pay lip service (literally) to the notion of atonement when they recite that passage of the Lord’s Prayer that goes, “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” But there are a shedload of Christians who run through that whole prayer without giving it much thought.

That may be true of Jews at the High Holy Days, too. But I think that taking entire days out of your life and devoting them to the notion of enumerating your transgressions and asking forgiveness (as well as accepting others’ apologies) tends to focus the mind.

At any rate, I’m grateful for all my Jewish friends and their families, and I wish them all (whether in Herndon, Chicago or on a cruise around Iberia) L'Shanah Tovah.