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STRATEGY FOR THE DAY: say what you mean

I gave my Songwriting Workshop on Saturday (Mar. 13) at West Los Angeles College and the Saturday before at Ventura College. Both classes went very well. I had great students - interested, motivated, involved in the material. They listened to my torrent of information and asked good questions. In order to cover all the information in just three hours, I use a lecture outline to stay focused. At my first workshop, six months ago, I didn't get through all the information. So afterwards I went through the outline and trimmed it. Now that I've given the workshop a few times with the new outline and am getting through everything in the time I have (with even a little left over) I've begun to relax, take more questions, and get to a couple of interesting asides. Still, in one of the classes, a student called me "a human flowchart" - I took that as a compliment!

I didn't spend much time resting up. I'm giving a four-week version of this class in less than two weeks and I have a lot of prep work to do. Also getting ready to demo a new country song next weekend and working on the next Ted Airlines program.

But in my spare time...

I'm currently reading an excellent book called "The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary" by Simon Winchester. The author is obviously a lover of words - the history of words, the gathering of words, the defining of words - and uses a great many interesting ones, only a few of which I've never heard before, but several about whose definitions I am somewhat vague. Since I don't have an OED to look them up, I must limp along the best I can. It is a fascinating and illuminating tale. From the lives of the quirky, colorful, erudite, exasperating troupe of scholars who led the faithful (or not) army of volunteers and assistants who painstakingly amassed the 414,825 words that appeared in the 1928 first edition (many more now and always growing) to the very notion of the making of a dictionary, the narrative entertains and makes you think at the same time. Books don't get much better than that!

I had never really thought about the difference in the way the English language is treated - knocked about, roughed up, and bastardized - as opposed to the way the French or Italians esteem their languages, adhering to much-revered standards. It is both the bane and the great strength of English that it is capable of growing as rapidly as needed. As Winchester writes: "No critic and advocate of immutability has ever once managed properly or even marginally to outwit the English language's capacity for foxy and relentlessly slippery flexibility.... It changes constantly; it grows with an almost exponential joy. It evolves eternally; its words alter their senses and their meanings subtly, slowly, or speedily according to fashion and need."

Now there's a language I can live with - it's foxy!

Copyright 2004 Robin Frederick. All rights reserved.