Gentle Readers . . . and Maxwell,
I can't remember if someone was talking about a writer's love of eavesdropping on a blog or on some writers' forum-type thingy. But I definitely love to eavesdrop. I learn so much from it, and it gives me ideas. I especially enjoy listening to conversations in Spanish. I think, Those people have no idea that I know what they are saying. hehehehehe
What? They just called me a "fat whore" in Spanish? Well, that's not very nice.
But insults don't make me give up the listening addiction, and sometimes listening gives me a blog post.
Willy Dunne Wooters arranged for me to use the pool in his very nice apartment complex. One day last week, two young women, probably about twenty years old, were prancing around the pool in their bikinis (WDW is not allowed to go to the pool without me now that I know about the bikini-clad girls.)
One girl said to the other chicklet, My mother is so stupid. We went to a restaurant that had a sign that said 'free wi-fi.' She wanted to know where the wi-fi was. She actually thought you can see wi-fi.
The other girl shook her head and said, Old people and technology.
Yup! That's me, and everyone else older than . . . 50? 40? We are such idiots.
Then my two chicklets started talking about Facebook. I'm sick of everybody not knowing how to spell, one of them said. They keep spelling awesome wrong. It's a-w-s-o-m. Why do they, like, put in extra e's, ya know?
The other girl shook her head and said, Nobody knows how to spell anymore. I'm glad I learned, like, ya know, how to spell.
Me, too, ya know, chicklet. Like, me, too.
Infinities of love,
Janie Junebug
My motto as an editor: Authors are the authority on their work. I'm a full-service editor. For a reasonable fee, I'm your writing coach from the first suggested revision to the correction of the final typo.
Oh, I love the old people disparagement in front of me. I love the deer-caught-in-headlights look when I ask them how old and they say 50 or maybe 60. With a very straight face, I inform them I am almost 70. Well, I will be 68 in a month or so. But, that is close enough to 70, especially when they have not reached 25 yet.
ReplyDeleteI know Spanish but am not a proficient conversation listener. Despacio for me. But, I have caught some things Spanish speakers probably did not want me to hear.
"AWSOME" LOL, hilarious.
I had no idea you were that old. The young people would probably want to euthanize you if they knew what "euthanize" means.
Delete...My gosh. I pray that the next generation is smarter than mine. Sometimes I think that my generation can't be much dumber.
ReplyDeleteNo matter how stupid some people are, other people are even more stupid. I'm plenty stupid, too.
DeleteGo easy on 'em, Janie Junebug. Those chicklets are tomorrow's leaders. Someday they'll be brokering peace in the Middle East. Hey - next time you go to that apartment complex pool hit me up and take me along. A man's never too old to learn a bit more about wi-fi.
ReplyDeleteI would love to have the company of an intelligent adult at the pool. Maybe I'll invite Susie.
DeleteFor the longest time I thought Wi-Fi was pronounced Wee-Fee.
ReplyDeleteForever Dense
You're not dense. When that game thing came out, Wii (did I get the name right?), I had no idea how to pronounce it. I still don't understand the appeal of it. When I lived in Illinois I knew some people who seemed addicted to it. They would come to devotions and talk about what they played. I guess that's because God is a gamer.
DeleteI think the only reason i knew how to pronouce "WiFi" was because of "Hi-Fi" from the 1960s. Do you remember how they'd advertise record players with high fidelity or "hi-fi?" I remember hearing adults asking us to put a record on the hi-fi or to turn the hi-fi down.
DeleteYes, I remember hi-fi. I hadn't thought of that in a long time.
DeleteStop it. That's not real. Please say that's not real. Otherwise, I've lost my faith in humanity completely. As someone who un-ironically says "awesome" and "dude" with a staggering and embarrassing frequency, I feel like we have to maintain the purity of how to spell such idioms. I'm making a shirt, "Keep the e in 'Awesome'".
ReplyDeleteOkay. It's not real. Nothing in my microcosm is real.
DeleteI'm cringing in place.
ReplyDeleteAt least I'm not alone.
DeleteOh, my goodness. I think the day of writing really good English is fading fast. I absolutely hate the automatic fix on the cell phone texts. It can't spell either!
ReplyDeleteI have to keep an eye on auto-correct or it sends out my texts with very strange words.
DeleteNo! Did they really spell awesome wrong? That is...well, awsome, hehe
ReplyDeleteWould I lie to you, honey? Would I tell you something if it wasn't true? I think that was a Eurythmics song, and I hope I spelled Eurythmics correctly.
DeleteNot as bad as the doctor who says, "If you don't let me, like, operate, you're gonna, like, die."!!
ReplyDeleteI'm having a colonoscopy soon. I hope it doesn't, like, totally suck.
DeleteWe old people are like totally stupid!
ReplyDeleteI certainly am. I know nothing--except how to eavesdrop without being noticed.
Deleteyeah like thats why they have like spelchek :)
ReplyDeleteYa know, a lot of people totally ignore that red line under words.
DeleteI.LOVE.EAVESDROPPING! It's one of my favourite things to do by far. My best one was in the NYC subway when one girl shook hands with a guy her and her friend were saying goodbye to, and then when they got on the train one of them said "he was nice, how do you know him" and the other girl said "my hand smells like penis, does your hand smell like penis?!". Made my day.
ReplyDeleteThat is outstanding. I don't think I have anything that good.
DeleteIsn't that what's known as a "Dan Quayle moment"? The other girl deserves credit for shaking her head rather than her boobs.
ReplyDeleteThat's a good term for it. Her boobs probably jiggled, too, but I wasn't looking at her chest. I was too fascinated by her brain and what came out of her mouth.
DeleteYeah, I'm feeling the "euthanize the chicks over 50" vibe. If only I had done more when I was 16 and knew everything. All the facts I've accumulated cloud my fantasies. Dang reality.
ReplyDeleteI wish I'd had a lot more sex when I was young. AIDS didn't exist yet. I never knew anyone who got any type of STD. Yeah. Shoulda had more sex.
DeleteOne of the guys at work told us today that he could no longer text because the "e" button did not work on his phone.
ReplyDeleteI told him to just leave it out. No one cared about spelling any more anyway.
6 other people commented about how right I was. (Honestly, they are my age and their spelling/grammar horrifies me regularly, and as we all know I'm terrible with grammar... but you love me anyway.) What they don't know is that my texts are always miles long because I refuse to not write in full sentences and spell my words out completely. You know what I usually get as a reply?
"K"
*sigh*
I was, like, totally born in the wrong decade.
If you used bad grammar, it's true that I'd still love you, but you don't. Your grammar is fine, and you are such a talented writer. I spell out everything in texts, too.
DeleteSO sad. This is the product of the texting generation. Heaven forbid they actually spell out an entire word!
ReplyDeleteThey don't spell out words because they don't know how. They also learn "creative spelling" in school.
DeleteYou can get some great story ideas at the mall. A recent conversation between two seventy-something, mall-walking men, “. . . back seat bigger than most living room sofas and when it came time for the winner to claim his prize, that ol’ Hudson was the second hottest car of the night . . .” inspired my latest short story. I wanted to follow them to hear more, but decided to let my imagination fill in the details. When I need a story idea, nothing beats eavesdropping at the mall!
ReplyDeleteI like listening to conversations in restaurants, usually between a married couple or partners. People seem to relax while they're eating and make comments they shouldn't.
DeleteI had way too much sex when I was younger. Unfortunately most of it was with myself.
ReplyDeleteNow let's have some free WiFi with sausage and maple syrup.
You made me laugh. But what's new?
DeleteOn the bright side, those two chicklets deserve each other.
ReplyDeleteTrue.
DeleteYou can hear even more these days. Some of the one-sided cell phone conversations are mind boggling.
ReplyDeleteI just heard about the "creative spelling" and it is so distressing!! This weekend we were all wondering how they can teach kids to read by sight and how do you approach a new word if you don't know what a syllable is?
And I told Ian this weekend that if they didn't teach penmanship in school Gramma Rita was going to teach him.
Sadly, creative spelling has been around for quite some time. Ideas are more important than spelling the words correctly. Same with punctuation and any other grammatical concerns. But how does one understand what these kids are writing when the words are spelled wrong and the punctuation is incorrect? When my children were in school, penmanship was dead. Cursive writing had been removed from the curriculum. Previously, it had been taught in third grade. It became a teach it if you have time thing. Then the fourth grade teachers berated the students because they didn't know how to write in cursive.
DeleteWhat can I say, some people have no idea how to spell like who adds the extra e in awesome, oh yeah right all of us who know how to spell that's who................oh and you can't see wi fi what the hell..................lol
ReplyDeleteYou can't see wi fi was a little bit funny, but I didn't like the way she was belittling her mom.
Delete