Mo Urban, Yo

The school year is upon us once again. I have been a bad girl and have only visited Lehi High (a.k.a. my workplace) once this year. A lot of people complain that teachers get paid during the summer for not doing any work. Most teachers counter that by saying that they work all summer, but don't get paid for it. Let me explain how that works. Teachers get a lump sum a school year for the nine months they teach. They do not get paid for the time they have off, they just continue to receive a paycheck. This is beacause the school districts take the nine month salary and divide it by 12, so teachers don't have to go through the summer without pay. Most teachers are in the classroom all summer getting ready, so they really do work for free. I am not one of those teachers. I keep my distance, even if I do have to move classrooms. However, I digress.

What I really wanted to write about was something I ran across in my preparations for the coming year. One of the first units I am going to teach to my honors students is what I talked about before, futuristic fiction. In the midst of that unit, I am going to talk about how vocabulary and language have a profound effect (affect? I never know) on the culture we live in, and it also gives clues to other cultures what we are like. One of the activites I have planned is to give the students a list of new words created by this generation, and the definitions, and the students are supposed to perform skits using these new words so we can see our new language in action. These words are coming from a book I got with my special purchase of Juno entitled Mo' Urban Dictionary: Ridonkulous Street Slang Defined.

I was going through this dictionary and editing (since most of America is disgusting), trying to come up with a list that would be school appropriate, and I found a couple of really interesting words that I appreciated and might begin to work into my vocabulary:

1. artificially busy: Feeling like you have been extremely busy and you have no time for anything fun anymore, but never accomplish anything. Yes. I understand this. This is what I feel like all summer--those Special Victims Unit episodes exhaust me so much that I can't even clean my house.

2. anablog: The old-fashioned journal made up crushed tree pulp you write in. It is usually bound. For some reason, people used to like writing opinions only the read. It is a fad past its prime, but Borders still sells them. Which leads me to question, why are we so ready to blog, but so reluctant to journal? Hmmm?

3. blogorrhea: To write a blog entry just for the sae of posting an entry, not beccause you have done anything interesting today. The very contents of this particular blog....

4. pluto: to downgrade, demot, or remove altogether from a prestigious group or list, like what was done to the planet, Pluto. You wouldn't believe it, but I went to a teaching conference this year, and there were a lot of teachers that were upset about this. This is one word that really defines a generation...

5. January joiner: Someone who joins the gym in January as part of a New Year's resolution and by February is back to being a couch potato. Guilty.

6. I was all: Expression commonly used in plave of "and I said" when reenacting a past conversation. Usually followed with the response to said conversational dialogue in the form of "and she was all." I work at a high school. I couldn't have explained sophomore girls any better.

Anyway, I won't cause you to "bring a book" (bore you), so I will stop with all this "off the reservation"-ness (craziness), and let all you "homeskillets" (friends, homies) "hold it down" (to take care of oneself and/or one's surroundings in another's absense) while I go "slap in a a plasitc" (put in my contacts) so I can be "arm candy" (a remarkably attractigve person accompanying another lucky person) for my significant other. Hasta (by, see you later, adios).