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At the start of every year, I review my memberships and affiliations. I pass quickly over the Colorado Red-Bearded Pundits Association, a benevolent group led by Bob Ewegen, the only other member. Our altruistic goal is to improve the wretched living conditions and self-esteem of the unfortunate children of barbarossan wordsmiths by raising their fathers' pay.
Another significant two-member group is the Salida
School Board Monitoring Commission. For the past eight
years, Kirby Perschbacher has served as generalissimo and I
as commissar. At our next meeting, I should propose that we
update the titles, but an unwritten by-law holds that
whoever proposes anything has to buy the next round. I can
wait until he brings it up, no matter how bad
commissar
looks on my curriculum vitae.
Then there's the Chaffee County Computer Club, with
about 30 members. In a small town, anybody can be somebody,
especially if you're not at the meeting to protect yourself
when they're electing officers. So for the better part of a
decade, I have produced the club newsletter: SCUM, which
allegedly stands for Salida Computer Users'
Monthly.
All that remains is the Society for the Constitutional Implementation of Official English in Colorado, where my position as Enforcement Director requires an annual report.
The State of the State Language is not good. We lost two
masters in 1992, Steve Frazee and Dick Connor. (Every time
that I and friends would discuss the general imbecility of
sports writers -- the elevation of the trivial, constant
shilling, fractured syntax, promoting everything that is
sick and stupid about the priorities of our universities --
someone would say, They're not all like that. There's
Dick Connor.
And we all would agree. The man deserved
every accolade I've read.)
Further, despite our best efforts to keep our Official
Language pure, we kept finding frisson
in the public
prints.
The word is French. The French operate an academy to
keep our words out of their country, and we must retaliate
with a similar barrier. Otherwise, our balance of trade
will suffer because we import more words than we export,
and President Clinton won't be able to grow the
economy.
However, we are in the market for a new word for the
likes of Doug Bruce and Ross Perot. Here are men who've
never plowed a snowy road, platted a new sewer line, or
caught a stray dog -- and yet they're supposedly experts on
how to run a government. High officials of both parties
rush to consult them and to publicly kiss their a-- no,
make that touch the hem of their garments.
Official
English is a family dialect.
Anyway, we're open to suggestions for a word that means
someone who has never held a public responsibility but
still receives public obeisance from those who should know
better.
Godfather? Padrone? Majordomo? Reichsfuhrer?
We'll take it from any language on earth -- except French,
of course.
NOTE TO RAY: Barbarossan won't be in your dictionary.
Its root is not the Greek word barbarian.
Instead it
comes from Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I, a/k/a
Barbarossa, which is Italian for red beard
--
barbar,
beard, plus rossa,
red. I just made
it an English adjective.
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