Kalamazoo and waltzing and australopithecines, these are a few of my favorite things

According to my mother, my favorite word at age two was banister. Whenever going down stairs, I had to tell everyone that they had to hold on to the (big inhale to get ready for the word) banister.

A year later, having seen Anne of Green Gables several dozen times, my favorite word became chrysanthemum, mostly because I could spell it and no one else could. When my friends and I played school, I would give spelling tests that included words like cat, dog, no (I was also an expert speller of n-o n-a-p!), and, of course, chrysanthemum. It wasn't until I forced my sister to sit through the movie with me that someone else I knew finally figured out how to spell it. I didn't care that I hadn't the slightest idea what a chrysanthemum was, my ability to spell it clearly proved my superiority to other preschoolers.

There was a very long stretch of time in high school where my favorite words were Kalamazoo, willow, and waltz. My life got especially exciting every summer in high school when I'd go to Kalamazoo for an ice dance clinic, where I'd be working on dances like the Willow Waltz. And seriously, you need to cheer yourself up? Just say Kalamazoo once or twice, and you can't help but smile.

My favorite word since last fall has been australopithecine. I was required to learn all about australopithecines for my Anthropology class last fall, and about the only thing I remember is that australopithecine is really, really fun to say (it may or may not be the case that I remember nothing else because Karisa and I spent the entire semester doing sudoku, crossword puzzles, and making snide comments about how our professor knew nothing about linguistics).

Now comes the fun part: a linguistic analysis of favorite words! Feel free to skip the next two paragraphs if you, for some odd reason, don't want a short linguistics class. Several of my favorite words were my favorites simply because they were long and unusual. Okay, banister isn't super long or super unusual, but pretend you're three. There, now it seems a little more long and unusual. Unless you're a gardener, you don't go around talking about chrysanthemums, and you'd have to be a very single-minded anthropologist to find a way to use australopithecine in a regular conversation.

The second category my favorite words fall into is that of words with letters that are perceived as being interesting. Kalamazoo and waltz both have z in it, and even though that phoneme (or sound) is really frequent in the English language (you say it in houses, dishes, lads, and really most of the plurals out there where the singular form ends in a vowel or a voiced consonant), I for some reason see the letter as being really exciting. As for willow, the consonants are either liquids (l) or glides (w). Not a single stop in the word! Very exciting stuff.

So, what's your favorite word? Is it your favorite because of what it means, or because of how it sounds? Anyone adventurous enough to do their own linguistic analysis of their favorite words?

The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things, by Carolyn Mackler OR How It's Done

I’m sure there were some of you who were disappointed that my review of Things You Either Hate or Love wasn't exactly overwhelmingly positive. Never fear! Those of you who wanted to read a book about an overweight girl named after a state that seceded from the union with family issues who likes to make lists whose best friend has geographically departed for a period of time, I have found another option for you! (Oh, and it’s the girl who has family issues, not the state that seceded from the union. This is an excellent example of ambiguity in language. Please take notes.)

This time our protagonist is Virginia, not Georgia. Virginia comes from a more or less perfect family, wherein she sees herself as the only blemish. Her older sister, Anaïs, is smart and athletic, and currently is off with the Peace Corps in Africa. Her brother, Byron, goes to Columbia and is handsome, popular, a star debater, and a straight-A student. Their mom, who is from Arkansas, has a Ph.D. in adolescent psychology. She used to be overweight, but now just works out obsessively and eats lettuce at every meal. Their dad is a software executive who “is the first to admit that he likes women skinny” (18). Oh, and the whole family can speak French fluently and they love artsy things. Virginia is pretty sure that she was a mistake. And probably was switched at birth, too.

Virginia is overweight, loves to read magazines and spend time online, obsessively follows pop culture, hates working out, and is not good at French. And, to top it all off, her best friend has moved to Seattle for the year for her parents’ work. She has a weekly makeout session (for more on the oddness of that term, see Karisa Tells All) with a boy named Froggy, but she doesn’t even consider him a friend. After all, according to the Fat Girl Code of Conduct (written by her), no fat girl should ever push a relationship with a guy, and she should overcompensate for her looks by going further than skinny girls. Virginia’s so convinced of her own inferiority that she’s sure everyone else sees it the same way. She doesn’t give people the chance to get to know her because she assumes they don’t want to.

Things start to fall apart when her old brother gets in some serious trouble, gets suspended from Columbia, and moves back home. Virginia struggles with readjusting her view of Byron, and she withdraws even further from her life. She deals with her emotions by eating, whether it's refusing to eat anything or eating everything she can find. She’s on the verge of self-harm, burning her finger on purpose and breaking her toe when she kicks a wall. But when her parents refuse to let her spend Thanksgiving with her best friend in Seattle, Virginia finally starts to take things into her own hands. She uses her own money to buy the plane tickets out there, and she finally starts to feel again.

She gets an eyebrow ring, and the most popular girl in school (who pukes her guts out between every meal) admires it, which is a bit of a wakeup call to Virginia. Her doctor, instead of telling her to worry about her weight, says that she might want to start kickboxing to get out her anger. She buys a dress she likes, and when her mom says it’s the wrong color for her hair, she dyes her hair the same color as the dress—purple. She starts a webzine at her school where students can vent about their lives, and invites Froggy (who had stopped speaking to her because she kept ignoring him) to join. She even faces the person whose life should’ve been ruined by Byron, and learns a thing or two about moving on. She writes a letter to her older sister telling her everything that’s gone wrong, even though her mother wants her to keep it all quiet. And finally, she tells her dad that her weight is none of his business.

After all of this, things with Froggy finally work out, but he insists on having a public relationship.

This, my friends. This is how it is done. You do not give your main character mono so that she can lose weight. You have her face her feelings, you have her face her problems, you have her start to work through things. Then, once she’s done that, she gets a boy. That’s fine. But her problems don’t magically go away, as they did for Georgia in Things You Either Hate Or Love. Instead, Virginia has to work through them. She has to tell people what’s bothering her. She has to stand up for herself. She has to do things on her own, break a few rules, break out of the box that she put herself into.

Oh, and if she references Ani DiFranco lyrics a few times along the way, that works, too.

The Unlikely Romance of Kate Bjorkman, by Louise Plummer, OR Alternate Universe Me

This book was published in 1995. I was somewhat relieved to discover that, because it means that Louise Plummer is not somewhere out there reading my mind. After all, in 1995 I didn't know a thing about linguistics, I didn't yet have my strange fascination with the Twin Cities in MN, I had seen skating occasionally on TV but hadn't been introduced to ice dance at all, and I didn't have any opinions on the process of writing or the distinction between fiction and autobiography or the conventions of certain literary genres.

Kate Bjorkman is a linguistics nerd living in Minnesota when she has a wonderfully romantic Christmas. She decides to turn her story of that Christmas into a romance novel, with help from The Romance Writer's Phrase Book, which can turn an everyday action into someone "flounder[ing] in an agonizing maelstrom" (8). As she writes her romance novel (which makes up the bulk of the novel we read), she stops every few chapters to note revisions she may or may not want to take, and she often has to decide whether or not what really happened has a place in a romance novel. Her family wants her to change the way she presents them, and her best friend thinks that since it's a romance novel, not an autobiography, Kate should have no qualms about changing things around to make her best friend a more important character. And since this is, after all, a romance novel, we get to follow her reintroduction to Richard, a boy who grew up with her, and all the romance that follows.

I picked this book up because there was a girl in figure skates on the front cover. You may think that I'm exaggerating, but I cannot put down a book that looks as though it may have something to do with figure skating. Sometimes this means I end up reading some really awful books with just one mention of skating. In this case, however, the characters went skating twice, and the second time they made reference to both killian and waltz positions, so it was totally worth it.

To add to the skating situations, there were lots of linguistics tidbits throughout. In the sixth line we already hear about a name ending in "an unvoiced velar plosive" (1). I always was taught that they were called stops, not plosives, but I can handle that. Kate also likes to identify people's hometowns by their accent and get into debates about the Whorfian hypothesis. I enjoyed this immensely.

AND, as if the figure skating and the linguistics weren't enough, we get lots of explorations of literary theory. Kate opens every chapter with an explanation of what this chapter should be doing in order to conform with the genre of literary theories, and by page 28 she's discussing feminist literary criticism. The distinctions between fiction and autobiography topped everything off, and I was a very happy English major while reading this book.

I wonder if Louise Plummer could both see into the future and read minds...that might explain the confluence of everything I love into one book.

Testing Week: Pass or Retry?

Tomorrow is the last day of testing week at the ice rink.

Testing week is a trauma-filled week. When I was learning how to skate, I agonized. The first time I failed, I cried the entire evening. My coach for that session very kindly called that evening to give me some comfort and motivation. I'm afraid I don't remember anything he said, mostly because I was just sniffling and saying "Mhmmm" at appropriate moments. I like to think that he imparted some very key wisdom upon me, because I don't remember being that upset about a test again until I failed an ice dance test about five or six years later. It's a shame I don't remember it, because I'd love to impart similarly sage advice upon my skaters so that they'd stop being upset with failing.

I mistakenly assumed that agonizing over tests would end when I became a coach. Oh, how wrong I was. The other side of testing is probably even more wrought with emotional distress, because on the other side you have power. And it is terrifying. I don't want to make children cry! I don't want them to quit skating because of a setback! And I definitely don't want their parents unhappy with me because they don't pass. But I've also taught the students who probably shouldn't have been moved up a level, and the next level is even harder for them since they don't have the skills to build upon. It's also harder for the coach, because we then have to work on developing skills that the skaters should've already learned. You cannot win (unless the skater is clearly ready to pass--then you both win).

My only comfort is the fact that I'm merely a skating instructor, not an official USFSA judge. USFSA testing takes place in front of a panel (usually of three judges) and this is even more trauma-inducing that Learn to Skate testing. For that, you have to pay just to take a test, and after you fail, you're required to wait at least another month before you test again. I don't think I could take the pressure. Of course, I don't think it's standard practice for parents to challenge those judges and insist that the judges are mistaken, so that's a definite benefit.

Linguistic note of the day: I love all the euphemisms skating will find to say you failed. In Basic Skills you don't fail, you just need improvement, and with USFSA tests, you simply will have to retry. My coaches would frequently tell us stories about how in their day, you didn't retry, you simply failed and there was nothing you could do about it. No sugarcoating things for them. They all made it through okay, so maybe I don't have to worry nearly as much about traumatizing the next generation of skaters.

What on earth is a burnt orange life?

Recently I was chatting with some friends, and one said, "I recently had a conversation about you and burnt orange."
"And what was the conclusion?"
"That you can wear it."
I wear a lot of burnt orange, and I frequently lament the lack of burnt orange clothing out in the world (the above friend says this is because no one else can wear it). So when the time came for me to start a blog, I decided to combine my love of anything French with my love of burnt orange in creating a title.

Since I am English major and a writing tutor, I know that introductions should tell the reader what one is going to discuss. So, reader, here are some things that are going to be in this burnt orange life:

1) A lot of Young Adult Lit discussions (or any literature discussions, really). I love YA Lit. I love giving my opinion about books, especially since I'm no longer taking any literature classes. I love literary criticism. I really really really love writing pieces of literary criticism about YA Lit.
2) My thoughts on the figure skating world. I'm a bit of a figure skating nerd. Just a bit of one.
3) Quotes from those learning how to figure skate. I collect them and will someday publish a book of all the best ones, but for now you can read them without having to purchase the book!
4) Stories that might have anything to do with French or Francophone culture. Said stories will possibly be presented mockingly, but I mock the French only because I love them. Also because they mock me right back.
5) Linguistics ponderings. I go back and forth deciding whether or not I want to get a PhD in Linguistics, but until I decide to go for it, all the topics I would be doing research on will instead be analyzed here.
6) Any successful obtentions* of burnt orange clothing.

So that's the plan. However, as I know from writing several hundred papers over the course of my life, I do not always stick to the plan from the introduction. Anything could happen!

*The word obtention is in the OED (more on the OED later), so as far as I'm concerned, it's a word. I was a bit disappointed, since I thought I'd made the word up, but at least I can cite the OED if someone tries to tell me that it isn't a word.