In a Word: Nuts Edition

Over at Harmonia's Necklace, k8 lets us in on the latest skirmish in the culture wars:

In case you haven't heard, there is a controversy with this year's Newbery Award selection, The Higher Power of Lucky. The author had the "audacity" to use the word scrotum in the text. You can read about it here at NYT and here at librarian.net. Apparently, some parents, librarians, and teachers are trying to keep the book out of school libraries because of this one word (which, by the way, is used in a sentence that indicates that a rattlesnake bit a dog's scrotum - we aren't talking about pornography).

C'mon people. In a huff over "scrotum?" That's just nuts.

In a Word: Dangeral Edition

Most who read this blog will probably already know that Michael Bérubé has decided to hang up his keyboard. His retirement will leave the lefty-academic blogosphere (and most of the rest of it as well) greatly diminished. It will be a long time before another blogger with Michael's combination of formiddable intelligence, boundless knowledge, sharp wit, and unsappable energy comes along.

So, in honor of his retirement from blogging, this week's "In a Word" will feature a term that Michael himself coined: dangeral. As in his official title, "Michael Bérubé, Department of Dangeral Studies."

A Trotskyite faction of cultural studies--and the new avant garde of the (ultra)liberal arts--dangeral studies is an area of scholarly inquiry indoctrination that wears its plans for leftist global domination on its elbow-patch-adorned sleeve.

До свидания, comrade Bérubé.

In a Word

I'm going to try to pay attention to interesting words I come across in my reading and feature one or two occasionally here. I haven't decided yet how regularly, but I might try to make it a once-a-week thing, like Bérubé's ABF Fridays or Spencer's Found Fridays.

The inaugural installation: lagniappe.

–noun
1. Chiefly Southern Louisiana and Southeast Texas. a small gift given with a purchase to a customer, by way of compliment or for good measure; bonus.
2. a gratuity or tip.
3. an unexpected or indirect benefit. (From dictionary.com--in this case a better resource than the OED).

"As long as the freshman-sophomore persistence rate goes up, [first-year composition] is a good investment, and the fact that the students get some real graduation credits for the experience is lagniappe."

--Bob Connors, characterizing administrators' attitudes toward FYC in a 1997 post to the WPA-L.