LY #143 Update on the Patrick Lanning Thing

 This is an update on yesterday's "column."

I. A. Richards

I'll start off this morning by apologizing to my colleague Ron Paradis though I'm not sure as yet for what.  I just opened up three emails he sent to me after my 9:00 pm bedtime last night and in one of them he told me that some people thought that I had insulted him.  If I did, it was not my intent but I know (from a thousand years or so of teaching communication) that intent isn't meaning. 

"Meanings are in people, not in words" is a truism of my trade.  Usually this idea is attributed to I. A. Richards and his concept of "the Proper Meaning Superstition:  "the common belief . . . that a word has a meaning of its own (ideally, only one) independent of and controlling its use and the purpose for which it should be uttered. . . . . Stability in a word's meaning is not something to be assumed, but always something to be explained. "  (The Philosophy of Rhetoric, 1965, p. 32)

So.  I'm sorry if the words I used were insulting to Ron.

That being said, it turns out that my reading of the word "rushed" through it's semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic rules showed some stability (i.e. I held a meaning similar to that suggested by both the dictionary and its placement in the story).   I was right in guessing that the Board had found out about the "administrative leave" issue before their St. Patrick's Day turnaround.  I was also correct in following out the negative connotation of the term "administrative leave."  There is indeed, according to today's story in the Bulletin, an "investigation" happening at Chemeketa.  I doubt, however, that Tyler Leeds will be following up this story as it's no longer of import to local readers.  But I will look into it for my own curiosity's sake.  Supposedly Chemeketa has an "award winning" student paper, the Courier.  Maybe I should give someone there a call.

Thoughts about the changing trade:

When I posted the link to yesterday's blogpost on Facebook, one of my friends was flattering enough to suggest that I might want to write news and commentary.  What she doesn't know is that I did indeed start my worklife as a journalist and at one point after a year in radio (late '70s), was offered the opportunity to apprentice to the editorial staff of the San Jose Mercury News.  Sadly, that offer came at the time of my first full blown depressive incident and was accompanied by a strong inner turn against the work for which I trained through my undergraduate years and first year of paid labor.  I decided not to follow the path of journalism.  And these days the two things I hate most about the trade -- the need for speed 'cause when it bleeds it leads -- are cranked up a thousand fold from back in the day.

The turn away from journalism shook up my life plans, to the extent I had any.  I grew up with the expectation that I would become a newsman.  One of my Dad's most oft repeated stories was about being called away from the family one Christmas day (before I was born) to go to a hotel room where the body of a woman was sitting on a chair with a bullet hole in the middle of her forehead.  I thought that a life of such incidents and stories would be a great job.  Until I had the opportunity to do it.

So tomorrow this blog returns to its usual meandering memories and media analysis (Good-bye extra hundred page views!)  On Friday I'll start the "final fifty working days" count-down.