Hayley’s Comment

I owe you, or at least myself, several blog posts. I will make it up later.

With myself about my inability to hit “publish” instead of “save.”

I did write yesterday, but didn’t get to proofread what I wrote as many times as I wanted before feeling the need to pass out. What a wuss. I’ve backposted it for ease of reading. Here’s

NaBloPoMo, Day 5

I hate to be a downer, but I can’t go with the word I had planned for today in light of the horrific shootings that took place at Fort Hood. My thoughts and best wishes are with the families of the dead and wounded, as they mourn and seek answers about what happened today.

So my word of the day is humanity. Looking into the etymological roots of humanity leads to some interesting things.

Humanity had no etymological root listed in its Merriam-Webster’s definition, so I went to human. Human, the entry read, from the Middle-English humain, from the Latin homo. See more at homage. So I went.

Homage, from the Anglo-French omage or homage, from home man (a phrase meaning vassal), from the Latin homin or homo, akin to the Old English guma for human being, and the Latin humus for earth. See more at humble. So I went.

Humble, from the Latin humilis meaning low, from humus, akin to the Greek chthōn for earth.

Now, the fact that “humanity” ultimately finds its root with the very dirt could be, for some, a sign of our own incomprehensible insignificance. Humanity is low. Humanity is dirt; unclean, imperfect. Humanity produces those who turn on their comrades and destroy indiscriminately. It would be easy to be callous or flippant about this, as I’m sure many are and will be. Easy to say it’s just another pebble added to the horrid cairn of senseless violence and suffering humankind has built, to point out that several other more tragic things may have happened today that we’ll never hear about because those afflicted are poor or not white or in countries without oil or in the way of getting to their country’s oil.

When I learned humanity grew from the root word earth, I found that beautiful. To me, that said all humanity is from the earth, united and connected in spite of its worst efforts not to be. I’m still an optimist and an idealist, despite the evidence to be otherwise. Maybe I’m delusional.

I’m not religious person, but tonight I’ll sit and pay humble homage to those who lost their lives today. On a day when humanity showed its worst, I’d like to make my contribution to balancing that out. I can be wry or polemical another day. I’d rather be human today.

The word that best fits my day today is self-aggrandize.

To aggrandize is to make great or greater or, as I’ve heard it used most commonly, to make appear great or greater. According to my Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, it comes from the French agrandir by way of the Latin grandire, to increase. Both of those words find their root in the Latin grandis, meaning “great.”

To self-aggrandize is to make oneself seem greater than one really is. In my opinion, there’s a heck of a lot of self-aggrandizement that goes on at this school and in academia writ large, and I’m awful sick of it.

It’s not that I don’t understand. I do. I often find myself puffing up for inspection, making the effort to appear completely in control, even projecting the image of excelling at everything I do. I live in pretty near constant fear (not crippling fear, mind you, but fear) that someone will pull back the curtain and see I’m really not qualified to be where I am or do what I’m doing. Some day, you’ll all find out I’m a charlatan.

As insecure and possibly unhealthy as that makes me sound, careful observation has shown me that almost everyone at this school is the same way. “Fake it ’til you make it” could be the motto of the graduate school. Where this gets to be a problem, however, is when students aren’t sure if their educators are also inflating.

I have loved working in my newsroom and it has been, on the whole, a truly fantastic experience. I would recommend this school and the print/digital media track without hesitation to anyone who thinks it might be a fit for them. That said, I’ve been upset this past week with what I see as unnecessary and unprofessional conduct from certain superiors to their subordinates. (Not mine, I’d like to say. This is all outside observation, so I could be off-base. I don’t think I am, though.)

We’re all only human, I know. It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day. But I have always held educators to a higher standard, perhaps an unreasonable one. Educating requires a certain selflessness and recognition of the fact that teachers give over so much of themselves for the greater cause of knowledge. I feel that some in the newsroom need to be reminded that their duties as teachers are as, or more, important than their duties as editors. They need to deflate a little, give up a little of the power trip and approach the concept that their holding our grades and professions in their hands from the position of nurturer rather than overseer.

We’re students; that puts us in a vulnerable position. But we wouldn’t be paying to study theory and ideals if we didn’t want to. An editor here is not supposed to crush us deep down where we’re still green and hopeful. That’s the job of other editors in the real world; that’s our own job as we strike our personal balances between the ideals of the Journalist’s Creed and the cruel, capricious world.

I want my hopes and spirits high at the start, so that I’ll still have something left when they inevitably fall. Maybe that’s just me. Could we just aggrandize and make the newspaper greater, instead of self-aggrandizing and making it petty?

My good friend and fellow j-student Mary suggested that I pick a theme for this little experiment, which might make it easier to blog daily. After hemming and hawing about it, I’ve decided that she’s right. This will also probably stop this blog from becoming my depository of excess emotion ala my old LiveJournal. (No, I won’t tell you where you can find it.)

I decided I didn’t really want to write about journalism because that’s all I think about all day and, quite frankly, I don’t think obsessive thought about my industry all the time is healthy for me. On the other hand, I want to write about something I love.

So what’s the theme?

Logophilia.

No, it’s not quite as dirty as it sounds. A logophile is someone who loves words; logophilia is the love of words. I am one of those people. I consult Roy Blunt Jr.’s book Alphabet Juice nightly to get a little wordsmith fix. If I had my college life to live again, I certainly would have studied linguistics. So for the rest of this month, I will be posting a word that fits my day with all the accuracy of lightning — as opposed to Twain’s devilish lightning bug — or just one I want to expound on that day. I may throw in the occasional charming turn-of-phrase, too.

Today’s word, of course, is logophile.

Feel cheated? Chew on these words, courtesy of Random House: verbiphage (one who devours words), logolept (a word maniac) and logogogue (a self-styled word expert.)

Might as well post for the 2nd. I’m still awake, despite my best efforts to the contrary. A lot of it comes from guilt over having just turned in an unconscionably terrible paper to an extremely nice professor.

I’m just so sick of writing essays. I have my beefs with the Missouri method (though I suspect those boil down to my beefs with human nature) but at least I get to write…not-papers. I do so hate writing papers and am so glad I didn’t run off to become a history PhD like I’d always planned. Or even worse. Get the JD/PhD from Columbia that I was planning on for about a week. That would have killed me.

In the end, my loved ones, I’m just not that brainy. I don’t get excited about theory and I don’t get excited about citations like I used to. (Yes, I really do love Turabian.)

I’m really looking forward to D.C. Maybe I’ll feel like an adult there.

The ugliest name for a movement ever.

Yet NAtional BLOg POsting MOnth sounds like a good exercise for me, since I never ever ever blog. I might do NAtional NOvel WRIting MOnth, too, just to keep myself prosing.

Day 1: done.

Gosh almighty, Mississippi was a blast and a half. Ole Miss beat Arkansas into pork chops this weekend and I got to watch. My favorite part of the Ole Miss game was listening to the fans around me. They were going all in that whole game — screaming, swearing, offering to get drinks for each other. Lovely, lovely people.

I used to think that Missouri was kind of the South, but I retract that totally and completely. It’s a whole different and wonderful world down in Dixie.

The blog stats function on WordPress is totally creating more questions than it’s answering. For me, anyway. People are getting here in the weirdest ways — mostly from Facebook groups that I’m not a part of, but my friends are. I’m totally intrigued.