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SCOTT
VANDER PLOEG
Scott Vander Ploeg is a scholar and writer who contemplates our culture from Madisonville, Kentucky.
 Big Words
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Let’s start today’s vociferous pontification with the word, “indefensible.” If I say it is indefensible when you argue I should eschew big words like indefensible, because they are too “big”, you have just proven my point. There is no logic that holds up in a light drizzle for advocating only the use of a monosyllabic vocabulary—and yet this is the bulwark of contra-wise complaint over loquitur polysyllabilis. I’m told I’m prohibited from expostulation that my readers or listeners don’t know, even if it is the spot-on most precisely serendipitous word for that felicitous juxtaposition, in both denotation and connotation. We know, of course, that the real reason people tergiversate from facing ten-dollar words is that they, the auditors, are egregious in their indolence when so confronted. They see it as a bellicose badge of honor to claim that nobody should employ language that is more sophisticated than their own level will sanction. This is the both the acme of lassitude and the lair of inanity, or synchronically and contemporaneously incorrect, id est, it’s up and down wrong.
Bill Shakespeare is purported to have possessed a plethora of platitudinous polysyllables, comprising a word-trove of at least 29,066 items, further ammunition for the argument that the Stratford-on-Avon born poet and playwright was not the author of the three dozen+ plays, 154 sonnets, and handful of narrative and other poems which tradition has attributed to him since the 1700s. The active vocabulary of the average person today hovers around 1,500 words, while the tacit word base may extend Joe Schmoe’s reach to a total of 3,000. In other words, we are about a tenth as language capable as was the archetypically greatest paragon of writers.
Why put on airs, be accused of pomposity, sanctimony, or otherwise be shunned and denigrated because of a penchant for purple prose? Being that we aren’t Tudors, it is understandable that we would gainsay enfranchisement in Shakespearean syntax, and yet if the Bard is using our language, shouldn’t we be able to understand him? And yes, he is using our language, apparently better than we do today! Post Hemmingway and E.B. White, we have been encouraged to only use terms that are mutually understood by the ubiquitous average reader. Today’s mythic average reader sports a tenth-grade reading level, and so to communicate effectively with this lot we must speak and write in only the simplest of terms—or to put it in language appropriate for this average person, i.e., “we talk good.”
I have read and heard undulating language use that is overstuffed and pretentious and wrong in that the words are used only for the sake of impressing the reader/listener with the erudition of the person who waxes so intellectually acute. Even so, there is usually more grist in the mill of such prognostications than in the threadbare minimalisms of the straight-talk camp. To choose to not use the words of our language out of fear that the receivers will reject it, because of my exotica or superficial floccinaucinihilipilifications, is to throw the proverbial baby out with the inky bathwater.
English has become the top choice for international business, and that is surely in part due to economics and political persuasion. But it is also because it is one of the more precise and exacting languages in the world. It is an accretion of several languages atop the sturdy Anglo Saxon base, melded with Danish, Celtic, and Latin, infused with Norman French, and seasoned with later connections to multiple international languages. It is amazingly plastic and adaptable. It’s like a wonderful souped-up roadster—and it is a shame to drive it slightly, negligently, and far under the speed limit.
Good users of the language are ebullient to encounter terms that are unfamiliar; they are verbally perspicacious. I’m happy to provide that service, if seemingly self-indulgently. This exercise in verbal diarrhea was endited for Jane Henson, Blue Badge tour guide extraordinaire. I recently spent a week and a half in her expert company, touring English family historical sites, and at the end had to admit her erudition and humor was a match for me. We sparred in word use, and this is my paean to her. Last word, Jane: this is like a Medievial miseracord: it is fundamentally supportive. Ha, ha!
Luck of the MG-TD
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The letter-writer had provided a litany of automotive mishaps, everything from an engine that caught on fire to three wheels falling off. “You couldn’t be more unlucky than if you owned a 1952 MG-TD,” replied one of the Tappet Bros. on the unavoidable Click and Clack radio program, heard on this and every other PBS radio station. My ears pricked up, because I happen to own a ’52 MG-TD.
When I was twelve years old, my father revealed a long hidden yearning for the MG Midget series. A neighbor had one, and the near proximity triggered a latent memory in dad. His family had owned a Pontiac dealership in Lafayette, Indiana, and in the years after he returned from his Army stint in WWII, the showroom floor included one of these gems. I think he must have test driven it, and probably would have bought one if he had been flush enough. But he was going to Purdue on the GI Bill, and couldn’t afford one, and instead got a degree in Economics and went into business and married and had a kid, me—in effect doing the responsible thing.
I suppose I should be grateful, for it was lucky for me he chose the path of responsible behavior, and did not blow his chances for security by getting the MG instead of finishing his degree. I imagine him sitting at a Formica-topped kitchen table with his mother, debating the pros and cons of scraping up enough money to buy the MG in the showroom. So what is the luck quotient of the MG?
They say that maturity is the habit of accepting delayed gratification, something pretty uncommon in the grab-it-now fast food micro-tech i-pod ready modern world we live in. Dad was a past master of self-denial and delayed gratification. It didn’t take much for me, at age 12, to convince him to buy the MG he had found for sale in a nearby town.
On the drive back from picking up the ’52 TD—black with red leather interior, powered by a 1500cc engine, instead of the standard 1250cc (roughly the difference between a motor scooter and a slim motorcycle), we tested Mr. Click or Clack’s presumption that MG TDs are unlucky. Mom was following in our tank of a Mercury Marquis. Our top speed in the TD was about 40 mph. If dad tried accelerating above that wind-ripping speed, the MG would begin to rattle and shake as if it was an erector set sitting on a huge electro-magnetic table. Then it began to rain, and not just a little. The T-series of MGs are all convertibles. We pulled over and tried to unfurl the top from the back storage area. It may have been tried before, since having been mothballed a decade earlier, but it was like trying to unroll the taffy from its wax paper wrapping. The top would not seal, the wing nut fastener unable to hold. My job then was to keep my hand grasping that wing nut, my weight dangling to hold the top to the upper right corner of the windshield. The windshield washer blades were connected to a small black box housing a little electric motor, also affixed to the upper portion of the windshield. We turned it on and it whirred and the blades swept across the windshield in arcs a little larger than pie pans, and about an inch away from touching the glass itself. And then the engine died. We got out. In the rain. We unbuckled the bonnet/hood, and peered dumbly at the engine. It was hot. Everything seemed connected. Dad toyed with the carburetors, which looked like twin aluminum Worcestershire sauce bottles. He traced the problem to the fuel pump, and tapping on it, heard it click, sending fuel through the line. The car started up, and we drove on for a few miles, when the same problem occurred. I was given the task of jumping out of the car, opening the bonnet, and rapping on the fuel pump with my sneaker. I did this every 5 miles or so. It took two hours to drive that 40+ miles back home. Mom, still following, found our forward process so hilarious that she had trouble keeping the Mercury Marquis on the road, blinkers flashing to show the emergency status of the idiots in front of her.
It was the best time of my life. Dad had opened up and revealed his inner kid, and I got the chance to laugh with him in our pathetic happiness. Unlucky MG-TD? I can’t agree, and feel sorry for the Tappet Brothers, though I have to agree these are not cars for the faint of heart.
Governor's Scholars Program
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This is another of those essays in which I tell you about something Kentucky does right. In fact, the following subject is one that other states have tried to emulate.
By 2007, a total of 17,835 Kentucky kids had become Governor’s Scholars. After this summer’s crop, about 19,000 will have experienced this free summer enhancement opportunity known as the Governor’s Scholars Program. Begun in 1983 with a few dozen kids on the single campus at Murray State U, the program now enrolls around 1,100 students on three campuses. All of those who join will have successfully completed their junior year of high school. Based on Grade Point Averages and counselor recommendations, they are encouraged to apply in the fall of their junior year. The applications are screened per school and then per district, and then at the state level. Those who win an invitation to attend are usually the crème de la crème of their class. I’ve studied their application materials and note that at least two thirds have participated on their high school academic teams; half, at least, have been involved in sports, often as team captains or star players. A third of the 1,100 show up a week early, in order to attend an array of subsequent band camps, attesting to these students’ commitment to music. And many have shown additional accomplishment by taking on leadership roles in their communities—Habitat for Humanity, church groups, 4-H, scouting, etc. These impressive children are given a free chance to parley their youthful expertise into even greater knowledge.
For five weeks, these students are locked down on a campus, living with roommates in dormitories, overseen by hall residents, who are all graduated Governor’s Scholars themselves. They take classes in focus area subjects such as Astronomy, Psychology, Economics, Philosophy, Art, Health and Medicine, Environmental Studies, Economics, and Political Science. I have been privileged to teach Creative Writing in 2006, and Drama Studies this summer. In addition, the scholars-to-be take a General Studies course devised out of the quirky interests of the faculty. These are unpredictable courses and the students do not choose them. The goal, in part, is to present the youthful knowledge pursuer with something completely different from what they are used to encountering. In a sense, the intended effect is a kind of deprogramming, similar to what is attempted when a cult worshipper is returned home. The Governor’s Scholars Program is not what everyone thinks it is.
These kids have been hurt by an excess of accomplishment. They have overextended themselves. It is true that they do spend five weeks studying their focus area subjects, but that fades in importance as the weeks go by. Even by the end of the second week, the students are realizing that the main point is that the game of learning is especially that, a game. Knowledge must be fun. Part of that fun, is learning about the self, about how we interact with others, about how we deal with the unknown. It is a motto among the faculty that if you don’t feel uncomfortable during this five week exercise, at least a little bit, then you haven’t done the Governor’s Scholars Program.
We take them on field trips and we involve them in scholastic activities. I showed my students this year how to do Chinese calligraphy, and my drama students got to usher at the Kentucky Center’s hosting of Disney’s The Lion King. We also get them involved in service by holding a day long social work program at soup kitchens and city parks and homeless shelters.
GSP students aren’t geniuses, most of them, and they won’t radically alter the fabric of the universes, for the moment. But they are some of the most pleasurable and impressive people you would ever meet. They also are the guys and girls who are our best hope for a positive future. As Governor’s Scholars they are awarded special scholarship opportunities at all state universities, and at many even more prestigious institutions across the country. They go, and the hope is that they will come back. By our generosity in funding this, there is a far better chance that they will indeed come back.
Good job, Kentucky! We should be glad that our legislature, which isn’t necessarily composed of the most highly educated members of our society, has at least the wisdom to recognize the value of high academic achievement, and has sought fit to support the Governor’s Scholars Program.
My Dinner With Russell Jim
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I had occasion recently to meet and share dinner with an older Native American. The occasion was the grand finale celebratory dinner of the 2007 National River Rally, held in Stevenson, Washington in May of this year. I was attending as a representative of the Kentucky Waterways Alliance. This is a not-for-profit organization, with a staff of four, that creates a public forum for Kentuckians who are concerned about the integrity of our water supply. I was also attending as the Steering Committee Chair and Basin Delegate from the Tradewater and Lower Green Rivers Watershed Watch.
By chance, I missed sitting with my peers during the closing dinner celebration at Skemania Lodge, and instead took a seat at a table nearby. It happened to be the head table, though no sign indicated this fact. Other luminaries who had titles far greater than mine began showing up, including Don Elder, president of the national River Network association. Eventually Russell Jim sat next to me, escorted by a rather stoic young Native American man. Russell Jim was there to receive the national River Network’s top honor of the year, the James R. Compton River Achievement Award. Mr. Jim is a leader among his tribe, the Yakama, and he has led their environmental protection efforts. The Yakama had been the beneficiary of our early efforts in nuclear power. They inherited the radioactive waste we burried on their tribal land.
Mr. Jim was old like a weathered tree trunk. He wore his salt and pepper hair in two long braids. I guessed him to be in his early 70s, but learned he is actually older. He wore a vest over a blue shirt, a string tie, and a few beads and feathers, hardly overstated. We traded introductions, though it had dawned on me that I was in this particular current way over my head. It may have surprised him that I knew so little of his history, but then, he knew even less of mine. So we chatted as equals of a sort, and it was a certainly a remarkable encounter for me. I’d like to think there was a mutuality of the moment.
It was like sitting with Chief Dan George, who you would remember from the movie, Little Big Man. That would seem an unfair stereotypical comparison, were it not for the dry wit of my companion. The River Network folks have a tradition of closing their dinner with a celebratory drum beating session. Our table, near the stage, was littered with piles of these drums. Russell was telling me about the hardship of having his ancestral land contaminated with radiation when his eye caught sight of these drums. He paused, and looked at the drums. He turned and looked at me, as though I might be able to explain them. We turned and considered the drums. Then in double-take he turned to me again and said, “We already had rain today.” It was perhaps the funniest deadpan straight-man line I have ever heard.
In his acceptance speech, Russell Jim spoke of the generation myth- story of how the gods of his land received early human visitors. This mankind was so frail that one of the gods, the god of the salmon, volunteered to take care of this mankind, and so he fed and sustained them from his own flesh. The Yakima, and much of the Pacific Northwest depend on salmon, and it is still one of their chief attractions and amazing mouth-watering foods. Mr. Jim had noticed the high rates of rheumatoid arthritis in his people, and helped write the national nuclear waste policy in 1986. The Department of Energy released documents that year attesting to the fact that the Yakama lands were hurt by radioactive leakage, discharges of toxic chemicals into the air and water, and thermal pollution. The salmon were tainted.
Mr. Jim and I are about as culturally different as you can imagine, and yet here we were, in the same room together, sharing stories of environmental degradation—Washington state to the Commonwealth of Kentucky.
It is not through our differences that we come together and gain from each other, but instead our strength comes from any time we can see how very much we are alike. And the thing that we all share in, regardless of background or political persuasion, is the absolute need to protect the air and water and land from our own greedy and wasteful and polluting practices.
"Syn Fuel" Again
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In the last few months we have heard a lot from Kentucky government and the coal industry PR machine about a technology and process that had been considered three decades ago and rejected as unworkable. If you recall, in 1979, during the Carter years, the Iranian government held Americans hostage in the embassy, and we responded in part by refusing to buy the crude oil that they produced, resulting in a reduction of gasoline production that led to a crisis in the economy. Long lines formed at gas stations, prices rocketed, and the public faced the fact of its oil dependence. Kentucky coal to the rescue—we heard a lot about a coal based synthetic fuel, called synfuel. The idea was to use coal as the raw basis for a gasoline substitute.
It has been a long while, but this bad idea has resurfaced like an oil spill. The oil crisis lessened, though prices had increased significantly, and we forgot about our oil dependence. Synfuel was developed, then neglected because it was unworkable—dirty, expensive, and there was no infrastructure to produce it. Now with gas prices fluctuating 50 cents below or above the three dollar mark, we find ourselves hostage again. Today’s version of the same plan is the ironically named “clean coal” initiative called coal liquification—liquid coal. Apparently we dropped the synthesis term because it sounds too much like an evil, syn-fuel, a sin of a gasoline substitute.
We learned a couple of months ago that Governor Fletcher had already given a go-head for tax incentives to two energy initiatives, both favoring the use of coal: a coal-gasification project near Ashland, and a coal-liquification project near Stugis; and both with one particular coal corporation eager to do business. That these incentives were approved without public involvement seems questionable, and interestingly, in spite of this, both gubernatorial candidates seem intent on using this kind of initiative as a way to attract voters. Is it a certainty that the majority of Kentuckians are such ardent coal supporters that they would automatically agree to these huge and hugely dangerous enterprises?
According to a 2004 estimate by the Department of Energy, the construction of each new facility necessary for production of liquid coal is a 7 billion dollar investment. At this point, the technology hasn’t improved sufficiently to make this “clean coal” technology clean at all—such that running a hybrid vehicle on a gallon of liquid-syn coal is the same as driving a Hummer H3 on regular gas: it is a dirty fuel. The EPA figures indicate that even after carbon sequestration—if that is even realistically feasible—liquid-syn coal fuel would burn 4-8% dirtier than regular gasoline. Moreover, the expense in retrofitting automobiles and industry to be able to burn liquid coal would be an incalculably large expense. Sure, we could do it, and thus have more reason to send miners into deep mines to risk their lives for profit, and lop off mountain tops, placing the unusable rock in local streams, effectively killing them, and strip mining the few remaining places where high sulfur coal sits close to the surface. Sure, we could do it, but one county I know of is so exhausted by strip mining that the Economic Development office can’t find available land to place new developments upon—who wants to build on abandoned strip-mined land?
Moreover, the tax benefit our legislature just approved will mean a 300 million dollar savings for the coal industry. That is about like asking each Kentuckian to pull $75 out of each wallet, for man, woman, and child, to give it to the coal industry. Consider, too, the expense of adding more carbon to the atmosphere, further exacerbating global warming and further harming the lung capacity of humankind.
We do not need jobs so badly that in order to have them we would further rape our land, pollute our environment, and falsely pretend this will solve our economic woes. True, we don’t want to continue our dependency on foreign oil, but should we trade it for further dependency on dirty coal? Let’s ask our legislators to explain this incredible inconsistency! Better, let’s tell them to not pursue this bad idea.
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