"Well, we got the first core loaded," Geekdaddy said to someone on the phone, "But I dunno if the second one is gonna go as smoothly. If it starts to melt down, call me. Even if it's midnight. If there's gonna be an explosion; I need to know so we can warn people."
As I slice olives onto a pizza, I wonder to myself if the geek has started a new career as a nuclear physicist or engineer at a nuclear power plant. He's just a tad absentminded about telling me things like that. And everything else, come to think of it. His mind is usually somewhere in a galaxy far, far away or out on the Net.
This time, however, I learned later that his mind was right where it should be: focused on switching over a significant part of the state's telephone system from one [insert appropriate telephony word here] to another [repeat the word in the first set of brackets]. This is apparently akin to going from a Mac to a PC and can have the same results i.e. crashes, loss of data, outages, and techs that gnaw their pocket protectors and yearn for the good old days when you picked up the phone and said, "Mabel, get me Central." And she did.
Sometimes I think people go a little too far with this acronym stuff. For instance, the geek was explaining some esoteric operation that the new phone system was performing and said it could do things that you just couldn't do with POTS. I know a lot of the terms he uses, but this was unfamiliar, so I wracked my brain (and missed the rest of his, no doubt, fascinating story) trying to come up with the words that POTS stood for.
Phone Over Transmission System? Pliable Outdoor Telephone Server? Pleasant Operators Telling Stories? I was stumped, so I gave up and asked the geek. "Plain Old Telephone System," he said. Boy, I sure wouldn't have thought of that one. Nope. No way. Why the hell he couldn't just say "phone system" is beyond me. TSFG, I guess. Too Simple For Geeks.
Lingo is great if you're on the inside, but might be inappropriate in some situations. When I dated a jockey, many years ago, he used to pray before a race. If he thought it was going to be a tight race, he'd say he was going to light a candle to the whole trifecta: Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. For an easy one, he'd say he was just gonna hit the quinella: Jesus and Mary. His mother went to early mass every morning and he'd tell her to put a deuce across the board on the favorite, meaning the saint whose day it was that day. He did win a lot and he always gave half of it to the church, "to make sure I'm in the photo at the last finish line" as he put it.
Even families have a lingo all their own. In our family, very young children are called, "bibbits," which someone told us is a French-Canadian term for pesky little mosquitoes. My oldest son took it a step further by saying that little bibbits are always making noises, "Bibbita-bibbita-bibbita," and that stuck too. He's the one who used to say "beedfirder" for bird feeder and "swatflyer" for flyswatter and "ours" instead of our. We called him a Toon because he couldn't resist cartoons on TV and he's still "Ours Toon" in affectionate moments, even though he's bigger than I am.
We try to keep this at home, though so that we don't weird out too many friends and neighbors. Some of them, however, don't return the favor. Our mailman leaves us cryptic notes about the legal requirements for mailboxes on rural routes, complete with diagrams with arrows and hash marks. Means nothing to us. Every once in a while, we move the mailbox a few inches forward or backward and repaint the number on it in a different color and size. We keep getting mail, so I guess we're satisfying the requirements of the USPS.
When my kids went to school, I got daily missives covered with jargon that might as well have been Greek to me. I particularly liked the rubrics (isn't that a great word?) that came home with the report cards. There was one for writing so that I could compare my daughter's little stories with what she and every other second grader in the nation were supposed to be writing for stories. Like anyone can know that? Hello? And we wonder why our educational system isn't working.
If Ma Hemingway had gotten little Ernie's rubrics, he might have gone into remedial Ed for English and spent his life selling insurance or something. “Ernest needs to put more expression and depth into his writing. Please work with him on this list of adjectives that every second grader should use in his writing so that his stories are more interesting and not so one-dimensional. You may refer to the rubric for further information."
The man won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for a novelette that could have been titled, "See the Old Man Catch a Big Fish", and still without using all the adjectives from the second-grade list. Amazing! Warning: Digression ahead. Both the Republican's educational program and the evangelicals' favorite book series are focused on not being "Left Behind." Coincidence? I don't think so. I believe that it's an ingenious plot to bring back mandatory school prayer. Hey, what else used to keep us from being left behind on tests, other than writing on our cuffs and looking at our neighbor's paper?
You know, after reading this over, I've come to the conclusion that all of my writing, while possibly autotelic, also borders on pleonasm. (That's writer lingo. You can look it up.) Instead of warning about digressions, I should alert my readers when I'm about to get back to the point, so they're not too startled by the abrupt shift. Unfortunately, that would mean that I'd have to have a point and actually know what it is, myself. I guess I'll just paddle around in the stream-of-consciousness for now.