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Post by schoolofselwyn on Aug 16, 2019 12:44:30 GMT -8
Millennial Becomes Unhinged After Boss Corrects Her Spelling of “Hamster”by Selwyn DukeBeing simultaneously comical and tragic, perhaps nothing reflects our descent into Idiocracy more than millennials who’ll insist their misspellings of words are correct. Just yesterday I read an eyebrow-raising story about this that was quite timely, as I’d experienced millennial spelling moronity just the day prior. My case involved a leftist who emailed me with some deep, substantive criticism: He said I was “insane,” “nuttier than a fruitcake” and “f*****g” nuts.” I responded to him. While I generally don’t play the spelling Nazi, leftists’ characteristic superciliousness inspired me to mention to him, kindly, that he’d written “you’re” as “your” three times in six sentences. His response? “I am under 40,” he wrote. “Your vs you’re is interchangeable.” (Come to think of it, if that’s his I.Q., it would explain his answer.) But on to the far more interesting and dramatic story I mentioned earlier. According to The Fellowship of the Minds (FOTM) blog, it’s from a series of July tweets by a Georgetown University adjunct professor of public relations and journalism named Carol Blymire; it relates something she’d witnessed. As the blog presents it: In office space near a client, a young woman was meeting with her boss. She was (by my estimation) in her late 20s.
The boss (also a woman) was giving her feedback and reviewing edits she had made on something this young woman wrote.
They had been speaking in low tones, but their volume got louder toward the end of the conversation because the young woman was getting agitated about a particular edit.
That particular edit was correcting the spelling of “hampster” to “hamster”. [sic] Apparently she had used the phrase “like spinning in a hamster wheel” in this draft (presumably) speech or op-ed.
The young woman kept saying, “I don’t know why you corrected that because I spell it with the P in it.” The boss said (calmly), “But that’s not how the word is spelled. There is no P in hamster.”
Young woman: “But you don’t know that! I learned to spell it with a P in it so that’s how I spell it.”
The boss (remaining very calm and professional), [said] let’s go to t.co/n2ZU5Uuuy3 and look it up together. (mind you, this is a woman in her late 20s, not a 5th grader) [sic]
The young woman insists she doesn’t need to look it up because it’s FINE to spell it with a P because that’s HOW SHE WANTED TO SPELL IT.
The boss says, “Let’s look over the rest of the piece so I can explain the rest of my edits.” They do, and I can see the young woman is fighting back tears. The boss is calm, cool, and handles this with professionalism and empathy.
Boss says, “I know edits can be difficult to go over sometimes, especially when you’re working on new kinds of things as you grow in your career, but it’s a necessary process and makes us all better at what we do.”
Boss gets up from table and goes to her office and the young woman can barely hold it together. She moves to another table in the common workspace area, drops all her stuff loudly on the table top, and starts texting. A minute later, her phone rings.
It was her mom. She had texted her mom to call her because it was urgent, and I’m sure her mother maybe thought she was in the ER or something. She then … PUTS HER MOM ON SPEAKERPHONE. IN THE WORKPLACE.
She bursts into tears and wants her mom to call her boss and tell her not to be mean about telling her how to spell words like “hamster”. [sic]
The mother tells her that her boss is an idiot and she doesn’t have to listen to her and she should go to the boss’ boss to file a complaint about not allowing creativity in her writing.
The young woman kept saying, “I thought what I wrote was perfect and she just made all these changes and then had the nerve to tell me I was spelling words wrong when I know they are right because that is how I have always spelled them.”
She then went on (still on speakerphone) to tell her mom I’m very great and office-inappropriate detail about how hungover she was and what she and her friends did with some guys the night before. Mom laughed and laughed.
The colleagues in and around the workplace kept looking at one another and some even put earbuds/headphones in/on. It appeared as though this was a regular thing with her.
She ended the conversation asking her mom how she should bring this up with the boss’ boss. “I mean, I always spell hamster with a P, [sic] she has no right to criticize me.” […]
Based on the way her mom spoke to her and they way they spoke to one another, it seemed as though this young woman had never been told she was anything but perfect by family. […]
Her boss seemed as dumbfounded through the conversation as I was in overhearing it.
I think I was most perplexed by the insistence of wanting to spell something the way she wanted to because SHE WANTED TO, ignoring the fact that there are rules and dictionaries. And seeming offended that anyone would suggest the use of an outside resource as reference. Had I been the boss, I’m sure the young woman’s tears would have flowed much sooner and more profusely. It would have been the result of the dressing-down I’d have given her. I was never one to suffer fools gladly. The FOTM mentions that this isn’t an isolated case, either. In fact, the blogger, who apparently has taught in college herself, related a story about what transpired when an undergraduate complained to her about a poor grade she gave him on a paper. After telling him that she had trouble understanding his work because it was riddled with errors, he replied “I don’t subscribe to the rules of the English language!” and marched from the classroom. It would be easy to chalk this up to “inventive spelling,” a phenomenon of recent decades whereby, instead of correcting a child’s spelling, a teacher will allow him to misspell words based on his phonetic conception of them. But it goes far deeper than that. First, we live in the post-Truth West. A study I often cite vindicates this assessment, showing that less than 10 percent of teenagers believe in Truth (absolute by definition) and that a majority of Americans are most likely to make what should be moral decisions “based on feelings.” Why is this relevant? If people believe Truth doesn’t exist and, therefore, that what we call morality (divine rules) is mere “perspective,” they probably won’t care much about man’s rules — especially since, by their lights, those rules can’t possibly correspond to anything transcending man. Their governing philosophy then becomes “If it feels good, do it.” This was evident in the young woman in the story, who, essentially, insisted she was correct because her feelings told her so. Relating to this, there’s also the narcissism, the solipsism, the self-centeredness that results when you raise godless children on self-esteem bunk and treat them as if their body odor is a floral scent. And, related to that, there’s pridefulness, which precludes self-improvement. A humble person can accept correction, see flaw in himself and learn. The prideful person’s ego impedes great improvement in anything. As for employees who are mere overgrown children, I’d respond to their antipathy for rules and their inventive spelling by giving them an inventive paycheck.
Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Gab (preferably) or Twitter, or log on to SelwynDuke.com.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Aug 16, 2019 13:07:50 GMT -8
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Post by timothylane on Aug 16, 2019 13:23:58 GMT -8
I think this rejection of grammatical and spelling rules (something that leaves me aghast, but then I'm the grandson of an English teacher) is a reflection of adolescent anarchism (which continues well into adulthood for many people today, especially leftists). This is an extension of the leftist hatred of authority figures, and with it rules and morals and all these restrictions on the carefree life of the grasshopper. I pointed this out many years ago in ST, I think, in commenting on Marc Scott Zicree's Twilight Zone guide, which repeatedly demonstrated this and a number of other leftist prejudices.
The 60s liberals have a lot to answer for.
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kungfuzu
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Post by kungfuzu on Aug 16, 2019 15:12:46 GMT -8
Must be a sociology major or something very similar. It is indeed hard to listen to such nonsense. I have just experienced the necessity of precision when working with computers. I suffered wasted time and exasperation simply for adding " before and after a line starting with the letters https. Such a small error made a big difference.
I wonder how that idiot "under 40" eunuch would feel about decimals being interchangeable when it comes to his bank account. Would he mind if the back indicated he had savings of $300.00 instead of $3,000.00?
And one should not forget that these types are the same ones who believe in a "living constitution" or are unable to understand the need for abiding by set rules. They are quite flexible with usage when it suits their position.
The examples are endless, but I have found trying to break through the barrier of stupidity, which surrounds such fools, is almost impossible. The mentally handicapped are able to learn from experience and repetition, but these fools seem to be immune to such a thing.
Only because your have received a third-rate education.
Here are some more examples of usage by these geniuses.
FDR dyed in 1944.
Millennials are lousy righters.
They hate people who are write wing in their political beliefs.
They just can't bare us.
Deer oh deer oh deer.
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Post by timothylane on Aug 16, 2019 16:38:24 GMT -8
Well, they're able to bare me in the nursing home -- I'm supposed to get a shower or bed bath twice a week.
Maybe FDR was dying Easter eggs. I remember doing that when I was a kid, but there were also adults who dyed most of the eggs, including the eggs hidden in Easter egg hunts. (Do they even do those today? I'm sure they did then, though eggs were probably rationed in 1944.)
And if you think about it carefully, millennials probably generally are poor righters.
But are those actual examples, or just for fun? I can imagine that people who rely on spelling checkers (a spell checker is a tool for witches and warlocks) might have trouble spelling when on their own (a problem that came up in one of Piers Anthony's punny Xanth novels when someone consulted a spelling bee). The same thing happens when people who rely on calculators have to do simple arithmetic on their own, I gather.
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Post by kungfuzu on Aug 16, 2019 19:02:39 GMT -8
Just for fun, but I have no doubt that one could run into such mistakes. When I moved back to the States, I was somewhat surprised at the poor quality of English I saw and heard in the news media. Even large newspapers contained many mistakes in basic grammar and spelling. My wife noticed it even more than I did, as she was taught English by English (nationality) teachers or teachers who had been taught by the English.
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Post by timothylane on Aug 16, 2019 19:33:02 GMT -8
Blog postings on Town Hall occasionally discuss some of the grosser spelling and grammatical errors in the articles. I see them in other websites as well. Too bad I can't hire myself out as a proofreader, despite my own flaws (notorious poor observational abilities). But then I can only keep $40 a month (the rest goes to support my Medicaid), so in essence I'd be working for free even if it were feasible to arrange it.
And of course I have my own errors, mostly typos and weird mental slips. Fortunately I catch most of them. I used to copy-edit FOSFAX repeatedly, finding additional errors time and again. And once we finally went to press, I was always afraid to see what slipped through.
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Post by Brad Nelson on Aug 16, 2019 20:20:46 GMT -8
Peter Fonda passed away today. Thankfully he can look forward to universal salvation.  I’ve never been prone to utopian thinking. I’m more like George Constanza, waiting to see who is going to screw something up. Different strokes for different folks. But I think the hippie generation was a degeneration of our culture. “Freedom” meant license to do what you wanted without any repercussions. Repercussions is for “squares.” A combination of Freud, Marx, Darwin, and Timothy Leary corrupted the souls of the flower-power people. They have been jumping ever since then from new-age fad to new-age fad, somehow trying to make their stupid ideas work. |
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Post by timothylane on Aug 16, 2019 20:43:57 GMT -8
The irony is that Timothy Leary was in many ways a conservative. He even wrote an article for NR back in the Buckley era (the '70s). He was a peculiar kind of conservative. I recall, studying chemical warfare for a paper, coming across something by him on the subject, but that was about 50 years ago and I don't recall the details (though I mentioned it briefly in the paper for a giggle).
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Post by Brad Nelson on Aug 17, 2019 7:53:28 GMT -8
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Post by Brad Nelson on Aug 17, 2019 7:57:28 GMT -8
In many ways a giraffe is an elephant. It has a heart, lung, kidneys, etc. The Wiki synopsis of Leary states:
That generation has been chasing utopia (including a utopian emotional well-being, even if drug induced, even if MS-NBC-induced) since the 60’s, and likely even before then.
Makes you pine for the days of opium dens when people had the respectability to be irresponsible in the privacy of degraded, but sequestered, surroundings.
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Post by timothylane on Aug 17, 2019 8:56:38 GMT -8
Quite a good article, though there are some minor inaccuracies in its description of Falling Down. Although Douglas's character (known as D-FENS from his license plate; I'm not sure his actual name was ever given, though one of the posters gave one) was unemployed, his rampage didn't start right after that. Rather, he left home every day as if going to work, and one morning got frustrated by rush hour traffic. So he got out and headed on to reach his wife. In the end, he was indeed shot by a cop in a showdown -- his gun against the cop's. As he dies, he says something to the effect that he would have had him - as the cop notices the water on his shirt from the man's very realistic water pistol.
But I especially liked its portrayal of Silicon Valley and its rotten denizens today. Unfortunately, however worthless they might be, they do have (way too much) power in today's connected society. And they have no ethical standards or any ability to connect one action to another. Just a bundle of feelings and a strong self-indulgent streak. This makes them hate conservatives with their restrictive rules. (Leftists can be just as restrictive, but they ban things like smoking tobacco indoors, which is no problem for them. A restriction on other people's freedom is of no concern to these narcissists.)
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Post by Brad Nelson on Aug 17, 2019 13:41:41 GMT -8
Normally Michael Douglas is the poster child for the angry white racist homophobic man. It’s interesting to see him used in defense of the steamrollered man.
A friend of mine (or at least a neighbor) told me that he was walking in Seattle several years ago. He had the green light to cross. A car was taking a right onto his path, threatening to run him over if he hadn’t been more alert. The car came to a stop in the crosswalk because of traffic. My friend said he lifted his foot and gave two stabbing kicks into the the passenger side of the car and crumpled the door pretty good.
That’s his story. Is he capable of that? Yes, I think he is. Did he do it? I’ll never know.
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Post by timothylane on Aug 17, 2019 14:14:22 GMT -8
I don't know if that's a fair description of a typical Douglas character. The other movies of his I recall are the comedies Romancing the Stone (a superb movie), its sequel The Jewel of the Nile, and The War of the Roses -- all with Kathleen Turner, who's certainly an asset.
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