Quacking Alone

With the dawn of 2013, a couple of university's turned their attention to their annual lists of which words should be "in" and which should be "out."

Lake Superior State University publishes an annual "list of Words to be Banished from the Queen's English for Misuse, Overuse and General Uselessness."  The list consists of a dozen words or phrases compiled from more than 5,000 nominations received from around the globe.

What words would most people like to see banished this year?  "Fiscal cliff" topped the list with 652 votes.  This year's list of words and phrases people wish everyone would stop using includes the following:

• Fiscal cliff
• Kick the can down the road
• Double down
• Job creators/creation
• Passion/passionate
• YOLO (You only live once)
• Spoiler alert
• Bucket list
• Trending
• Superfood
• Boneless wings
• Guru

I still kind of like trending, spoiler alert and bucket list.  Do y'all disagree with any of these?  Do any deserve to be saved from the fate of banishment?

Rather than listing words to be "banished,"  Wayne State University compiles a list of words it wants saved from extinction.

“We have a wonderfully rich resource at our disposal, the English language,” said Jerry Herron, dean of the Irvin D. Reid Honor's College at Wayne State University. “The more we use that language to its full capacity, the more we are able to discriminate and describe the world around us, the more interesting the world gets to be.”

Wayne State also accepts nominations online.  According to Herron, WSU looks for words "that describe a phenomenon in the world that is too little acknowledged or looked at and words that are fun to use."

This year's top 10 words to be saved list - and their meanings - are:

• Buncombe – Rubbish; nonsense; empty or misleading talk.
• Cerulean – The blue of the sky.
• Chelonian ­– Like a turtle.
• Dragoon – To compel by coercion; to force someone to do something they’d rather not.
• Fantods – Extreme anxiety, distress, nervousness or irritability.
• Mawkish – Excessively sentimental; sappy; hopelessly trite.
• Natter – To talk aimlessly, often at great length; rarely, it means simply to converse.
• Persiflage – Banter; frivolous talk.
• Troglodyte – Literally, a cave-dweller. More frequently a backward, mentally sluggish person.
• Winkle – To pry out or extract something; from the process of removing the snail from an edible periwinkle.

I like to natter about mawkish matters, which Mr. Duck considers so much buncombe or persiflage.  We all know a few troglodytes and don't we all spend a fair amount of time dragooning our children?

Frankly my dear, I adore both lists.  They're fun to look at, discuss and consider.  But I really don't think that any words or phrases deserve to be banished.  Let's enjoy all words instead.  If we didn't keep 'em around, we could never winkle the troglodytes from their caves and toss them off the fiscal cliff.  And if we eliminate the word trending, how will this blog post manage to do that very thing on Twitter?

YOLO, so I wish you a cerulean day, free of fantods and full of mawkish romance novels!

**MAY THE DUCK BE WITH YOU**

Researchers just conducted a timely new study that might make the holidays a little merrier this year - especially if, like me, you stress out over gift giving.  A recent study in the Psychology Science journal points to some keys to taking the stress out of gift giving.

First - does gifting always require shopping?  It must, right because re-gifting is bad form and insulting.  Well, it turns out that's not as true as it used to be.  The Wall Street Journal did a piece about the study, and here's what it said about re-gifting:

Take regifting. That Crock-Pot your well-meaning aunt gave you last year that you are shamefully contemplating wrapping up for your dear neighbor this year? Research shows you can go right ahead and regift it, shame intact. Your aunt probably won't mind.

Many people shy away from regifting, or hide the fact they are doing it, out of fear the original giver of the item could be offended. Don't worry, says a recent study published in the journal Psychological Science. The person who first gave the item is less likely to be offended than the regifter expects.

Recent research suggests that the "new" wears off a marriage after about 2 years.

In a hands-across-the-ocean project, American and European researchers tracked 1,761 people who managed to stay married for 15 years.  The results?  Their newlywed burst of "happy, happy, joy, joy" wore off after 2 years.   Given the tragically high divorce rates, I'd love to know many people were in the initial group to allow researchers to end up with a sample of 1,761 still-marrieds-after-2-years.  I'm betting - a lot.

The new love, the "passionate love" changed into "companionate love" after a couple of years.  That meant that the state of intense desire and attraction became a state of deep affection and connection.  The author of the NY Times op-ed, Sonja Lyubomirsky, suggests the transition occurs because humans are prone to "hedonic adaptation" - meaning that humans tend to take positive experiences for granted.  Ms. Lyubomirsky states as follows:

Sexual passion and arousal are particularly prone to hedonic adaptation. Laboratory studies in places as far-flung as Melbourne, Australia, and Stony Brook, N.Y., are persuasive: both men and women are less aroused after they have repeatedly viewed the same erotic pictures or engaged in similar sexual fantasies. Familiarity may or may not breed contempt; but research suggests that it breeds indifference. Or, as Raymond Chandler wrote: “The first kiss is magic. The second is intimate. The third is routine.”

There are evolutionary, physiological and practical reasons passionate love is unlikely to endure for long. If we obsessed, endlessly, about our partners and had sex with them multiple times a day — every day — we would not be very productive at work or attentive to our children, our friends or our health. (To quote a line from the 2004 film “Before Sunset,” about two former lovers who chance to meet again after a decade, if passion did not fade, “we would end up doing nothing at all with our lives.” ) Indeed, the condition of being in love has a lot in common with the state of addiction and narcissism; if unabated, it will eventually exact a toll.

I agree with much of the author's premise -- but I very much DISAGREE with her conclusion.  The intense, passionate characteristics of what the piece calls "new love" should only devolve permanently if it's more lust than love.  Real love - the enduring kind- is more like the ocean.  Life and its complications may intervene and moods may rise and fall.  All of that will - at times -  make the water choppy and rough.  There will be long sunny days where the water runs smooth.  But always, always, there will be the waves -- those events that kindle the spark and send you towering high above that normal, level water.

I was glad to see one finding of the study, though:  researchers found that the rush of newlywed love is often repeated when a couple reaches the empty nest stage.  See, that's because the love didn't devolve and dwindle - it was always there.

As to the author's other point -- Is love an addiction?  She likens it to narcissism or self-love but to me, that's the opposite of romantic love.  Romantic love is putting someone else's interests and desires first.  It's excellent training for becoming a parent, you know.  Mother Nature is smart that way.  The concept of caring that much for someone else doesn't remind me of addiction.  It reminds me more of dedication or devotion - like that moment when one of a person's talents connects with a way to use them to build a career.  I can see that addictive love would be prone to dwindle until it died, but dedicated, devoted love will continue like the roots of a tree - providing strength and support and nurture.

Real love isn't an addiction - it's a growth hormone!

Suzanne Venker's recent provocative piece for Fox News suggests that there is a war on men. This prompted Lauren Boyle of The Huffington Post to suggest that the idea of a war on men is actually a war on women.

Hanh?

While I was preoccupied with Thanksgiving, airplane flights and end of the year insanity getting underway at my office - DID SOMEONE DECLARE WAR ON MEN? Oh, I'd heard that there was allegedly a war on women earlier.  I never quite figured that one out either.  Birth control isn't an issue for me any longer and I've already reproduced (twice - may the Great Duck save the universe).

From reading the Fox piece, I gather that the war on men was caused by women getting college degrees and going to work.  Women became so delighted at the joyous delirium that is a 9 to 5 existence that they didn't want men to protect them or provide for them any longer.  Yet, at the same time, the abundant ecstasy of life lived at the whim of a paycheck and a boss also prompted women to be pissed off at men.  As a result, men have decided they don't want to get married anymore.

The Huff Po piece says that the notion that successful women emasculate men is, itself, a war on women.  Ms. Boyle's Huffington piece summarizes Ms. Venker's Fox piece like this:

So, if you're keeping score at home, Venker has 1) implied that young men are pathetic, 2) flat-out stated that they don't want to compete with women and 3) suggested that, if not corralled, all men want is sex and meaningless relationships without responsibility. If that isn't offensive to men, what is?

So my question is this - if there's a war on men and a war on women, who is leading the battle?  The last time I checked, there wasn't a third gender choice.  Maybe it's all a dastardly duck plot.  If the men and the women eliminate each other, then ducks can rule the world.

The likeliest truth is this --  there is no war.

I've never felt that men wanted to oppress me.  Heck, I've spent years trying to get Mr. Duck to forbid me to work and force me to pad around the house barefoot.  He refuses to cooperate.  He just wants me to be happy.  Go figure - right?

We don't need a war - we've got economic reality.  These days, whoever is lucky enough to have a job goes out and does it.  And there are a horde of stressed folks who can't pay their bills and worry about their kids getting educations and jobs.   Yes, there are men who would like to have better jobs or different jobs or even - a job.  But I've not heard them blaming women for the absence of a rosier economy.   Other than the general situation, the thing oppressing men and women the most right now are employers who no longer value experience as much as a piece of paper.

Neither of my diplomas (college and law school) taught me how to do my job.  Both of those programs taught me how to think.  I had to learn how to work on my own and it's taken me many, many years to acquire the knowledge rattling around my head.  Yet employers today don't value all those years of experience - they'd rather hire people with the worthless pieces of paper.   I've reached a point where I have both, but lots of folks started at a job and worked their way up and those folks may not have the paper.  When did knowing how to do a job become unimportant?

No, there is no war on either sex - there is a war on the underlying values that made America great. Experience and loyalty are considered not just unimportant, but irrelevant.   It doesn't matter if you can do the job - it matters if someone gave you a piece of paper saying you can do the job.

What caused us to reach this hideous point?  It's our insistence that fast matters more than thorough.  Yes, Virginia - that's how we got here.  I'm not really sure how to fix it except by re-focusing, long term, on what actually matters instead of what looks like it should matter.

All this talk of war means that we need a concrete someone to blame.  We want to be able to take out our troubles on somebody and if you're a man, you blame the women.  If you're a woman, you blame the men.  But we'll need both sexes to fix this mess.  So, I say, let's pick something else to blame.

You know what might make us feel better?  Let's go shoot our microwaves.