A Last WORD

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Grads, The Word pack their bags

By Ted Pease
Professor of Interesting Stuff

Editor’s Note: In the 1990s, Pease wrote a regular column for The Logan (Utah) Herald-Journal, a commentary on life in general with one foot firmly planted in the subject matter of the press and its role in society. Toward the end of that run, in 1999, this column appeared to mark the end of the season—for both the school year and that year’s run of The WORD.

This is a weekend of significant endings and important beginnings — appropriate to the spring season, of course, now that the monsoons have finally eased.

Yesterday, up on University Hill, the old Ag College loosed 4,000 eager new graduates on the world. And just the day before, another season of The Word wrapped up.

Both events were greeted in various corners of the globe with sighs of relief, as well as some trepidation. Giddy under their mortarboards, students exclaimed, “I can’t believe it!” Followed closely by a panicky, “Now what do I do?” Subscribers to The Word had much the same reactions.

The conclusion of the academic year also marks the end of another nine-month, hurly-burly season of a daily electronic torment that, though often reviled by many of its subscribers across cyberspace, also becomes as addictive as those little finger foods at parties you can’t stop yourself from munching.

The Word started three years ago as a teaching tool for my students, and has since grown into something of a cottage industry. Every weekday morning, just to remind my students that I’m still alive and watching them, I would send via email some little nugget of wisdom about the press.

It began with what for journalists passes for inspiration. Like this from Thomas Jefferson: “Were it left to me to decide whether to have government and no newspapers, or newspapers and no government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter.” Journalists like to quote that one.

And then there were the dollops from the classical masters, like Voltaire (“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”) or John Stuart Mill (“We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.”) Or a little tweaking from dark-eyed author Aldous Huxley, to jump-start the students on a gray morning: “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.”

But it’s not always so high-minded. For example:
• “To entrust to an editor a story over which you have labored and to which your name and reputation are attached can be like sending your daughter off for an evening with Ted Bundy.” —reporter Edna Buchanan.

• “Spitwads are not free speech.” — Bart Simpson, cartoon philosopher.

• “Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders.” — Walter Bagehot, humorist.

• “If you watch TV news you know less about the world than if you drink gin straight out of the bottle.” — Garrison Keillor, radio host.

One thing led to another, and pretty soon The Word was going off-campus to friends and colleagues around the country. Next thing I knew, there were people passing it along like a chain letter, and complete strangers emailing me to subscribe from exotic locations like Denver and Oxford, England, and somewhere in New Zealand; from my mother in Maine and someone I’ve still never met but now know quite well via email in Lima, Peru. There’s a journalism class in China that uses the Word as a “text.”

A retired newspaper publisher friend corresponds from his boat in the Florida Keys (that one hurts!). And then there’s a couple named Sam and Connie Taylor who live on 120 arid acres in northern New Mexico. “We raise Churro sheep, make art and sort of have a normal life except for the fact that we live with solar and wind-produced electricity and collect rainwater in cisterns,” writes Sam. I don’t know how he found The Word, but he makes his own electricity in order to receive it.

By now, my students — for whom The Word was originally designed — only tolerate it. Barely. But others out there in cyberspace find it addictive. People send in names of family, friends, enemies and members their staff at newspapers and in businesses, saying that The Word would probably do so-and-so some good (not that so-and-so always agrees). As of Friday, the subscription list numbered 783* on five continents, and includes names you would recognize from the news.

*[Note: The 2009 Word subscriber list numbers more than 1,700, not counting pass-alongs.]

An online outfit called the PRNewswire wanted to run The Word as a regular feature every day. And a newspaper in Colorado ran a little squib about this nutty professor in Utah who sends out these little nuggets, resulting in scores of subscription messages from strangers across the West. At a university in Japan — Sophia University, I think — The Word is a required daily “text” for a graduate class studying mass media and society.

“Surely I’m not the only one who thinks you ought to compile this stuff into a book,” suggests a newspaper editor in Tacoma, who put his mother back East and sister in Italy on the list.

Last week, sidelined by a little surgical housecleaning prompted by a rogue appendix, I missed a few days of The Word. You should have heard the cyber-outcry, which required my wife to send out the following advisory, slugged “Abdominal Editing”:

“THE WORD went into the local hospital on Thursday for what turned out to be the deletion of an entire appendix on deadline. On reflection, the WORDman would rather have been in Philadelphia. He is home now, admiring his new abdominal decoration and generally feeling sorry for himself. He says to tell you he hopes to reinflict the WORD (sans appendices) again tomorrow.”

Which prompted various cybercards and letters: “How could a mere appendix stop the inexorable march of the Word?” complained a Université de Paris professor. And this from Ohio: “It’s OK for them to take out the appendix. Just don’t let them touch the table of contents.”

New cries of joy and anguish this week, though, as students wrapped up their exams, faculty filed their final grades, and The Word concluded its year.

This was Friday’s bulletin: “Today marks the whimpering end of the 1998-99 WORD season (pause for cheers and general jubilation). As classes end here at Utah State University and we send our eager young charges off into the world, the WORD also is packing its bags for a long sanitarium stay to replenish its store of pith and platitudes. After some 160 offerings this season, the WORD is feeling a bit peaked and in need of new modifiers. Look for a new and improved season of daily dollops to begin again at the end of August. Good summering to all.”

But there are no real Final Words — as Karl Marx said, “Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough.” A new crop of both students and Words arrives in August. Stay tuned.

©Ted Pease, 1999
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