Posted by
The Hermit Crab on Thursday, April 03, 2008 1:31:52 PM
... is all I have, so I'll dispose of some short notes.
Books have been written about the failures of our education system (I own a few of them), but speaking as an operator who can only communicate with our customers via speech, one deficiency which exasperates me daily is that so few Americans know how to contextualize. This is the ability to work out what an unfamiliar word means from its context -- the other words in the sentence. This is a skill I learned in elementary school. A person calls Directory Assistance, and I get the call. I ask them for the city and state their request is in, and they tell me. As required by my employers, I then ask "What listing, please?" A distressingly high percentage of my callers have no idea what I mean by "listing". They won't even stop to try to figure out what I'm asking them for. I often want to ask callers "Who does your thinking for you when you're not talking to me?", but this is verbotten.
Did you work out what "verbotten" means? Class? Class??
On my old website, which vanished when the service provider folded, I expressed my concern that so many of the incoming Democratic chairmen were old, bitter partisans who had been festering in Congress for 25 years and more in some cases. Just one example for now: John Conyers, who I think heads the House Judiciary Committee (I haven't time to check right now), is investigating whether President Bush can be impeached -- AFTER HE LEAVES OFFICE. He says he'll use all of the executive branch records that will be opened to the committee after a Democrat takes the Oval Office.
One more reason to vote McCain in November, my fellow conservatives.