Today is Mother’s Day, the archetypical commercialized Hallmark Holiday.  (On a side note, it’s perhaps worth noting that the  founder of Mother’s day, Anna Jarvis, was arrested in 1948 for disturbing the peace while protesting against the commercialization of the simple celebration she had wanted to start in 1908, and said that she “…wished she would have never started the day because it became so out of control”.)

Anyway, last week, I was listening to CBC Radio’s Ontario Today phone-in discussion of suggestions for re-instituting discipline in households against the recent trend of permissive parenting.  One man called in with his account of how he corrected the behaviour of his teenage sons*.   He was disturbed at how they were using foul language and “disrespecting their mother”.  So, apparently on the advice of a family therapist, he told his wife to leave the house while he laid down the law to his sons.  The gist of his message to the boys:  “You are being rude to my wife in my house, and I will not permit it.”  According to him, this not only corrected the boys’ behaviour, but it taught them to respect their mother in particular, and women in general.

Wait, what?   The lesson I see here is that the boys are being told that they are to respect their mother because 1) she is their father’s property and 2) he is bigger and stronger than they are.  While I do agree that it is important for kids to learn to respect other people’s property, I think that properly refers to their houses and cars and bikes and books, but surely not their wives.  If the boys’ use of foul language is offensive to their mother, perhaps she should be involved in the discussion.  Otherwise, I worry that the boys are not being taught respect for women, they are being taught respect for the women’s owners.

I want kids to be taught respect for other people, regardless of gender (and of course other considerations, but that’s for a different discussion).  I don’t want boys (or girls) to be taught that females are special delicate flowers that need protecting (or at least the “nice” ones are).  I want them to learn that a person of another gender is primarily a person just like they are, and that they are to make no assumptions or distinctions solely on the basis of that gender.

* You can listen to the program here (starting around the 18:00 mark).

soon

Unfortunately, they’re not all as patient as Jesus and Mo.

Oxford Dictionaries ‏on Twitter @OxfordWords alerted me to the Guardian article, “10 of the Worst Examples of Management-Speak.” I love words, but sometimes the way they are used makes me cringe. Steven Poole has the same reaction because in his article, he “drills down into the strangled vocabulary of office jargon”:

1 Going forward is the “now-venerable way of saying ‘from now on’ or ‘in future.’”

2 Drill down “Far be it from me to suggest that managers prefer metaphors that evoke huge pieces of phallic machinery, but why else say ‘drill down’ when you just mean ‘look at in detail’?”

3 Action “can probably always be replaced with a more specific verb, such as ‘reply’ or ‘fulfil’, even if they sound less excitingly action-y. The less said of the mouth-full-of-pebbles construction ‘actionables’, the better.”

4 End of play “A manager who tells you to do something ‘by end of play’ – in other words, today – is trying to hypnotise you into thinking you are having fun. This is not a game of cricket.”

10 Sunset An imagistic verbing – “We’re going to sunset that project” – that sounds more humane and poetic than “cancel” or “kill.”

You can read numbers 5 to 9 can be found in the Guardian article, but I want to add one word that so many people use frequently either because they think it is correct or it sounds so much better than the word me: Myself  is a reflexive pronoun, but it is used, incorrectly, in sentences that say, “If you have any questions, you may contact my assistant or myself.”

deep2

Busy today, so here’s one from 6 years or so ago.