Hello Fellow Travelers!
My teenaged son does not enjoy reading. So what do I make him do? Whenever I get the opportunity? I make him read to me of course! Car-trips, gym sessions, doctors' waiting rooms are all good places to "get your read on", in my opinion, and since my opinion is the only one that counts (What do you mean you "don't like to read?" Learn to like it!) all opposing views will be summarily squashed.
Lately, we've been attacking the 9th grade literature syllabus. So we flip back and forth between "Romeo & Juliet" and "The Catcher in the Rye". "Catcher" is pretty easy to decipher, "R & J"? Much more difficult! So as the boy muddles through the Olde English, we let most wild mispronunciations go uncommented on (I mean come on, they don't talk like this on GOT, so who needs it?) but occasionally the lad manufactures a word or two that's unintentionally hilarious!
On our way to a Giant's game in The City we had time to read! Patient Spouse and I lost it because our son somehow derived "Lambicide" (CSI-Lambicide/starring David Caruso, this fall on CBS) where "Lammis Tide" was and "beauteous" mutated into "Bucius"? (a feminine Southern gentleman? A pit bull? Who knows?)
In our frantic paced, over-connected, multiple deviced world "The Bard" can seem antiquated and WTH?
As much as words mean to me, I have to take particular issue with a particular word that's as negative as an adjective as it is a noun - invalid. Whether it is a person in a wheelchair or the validity of your driver's license nobody wants any part of either kind of invalid. It instantly negates the person/document/whatever as worthless and illegitimate.
Despite my own intense dislike for them and out of absolute necessity I got a new wheelchair. It's the same basic, stripped down model I had before and I hope will be very temporary. In the meantime I was cleaning the wheels and peeling off the stickers when I came across the company name and logo - Invacare. It might as well be subtitled "Where Dreams Go To Die!"
Any wheelchair represents an acceptance of physical limitations I think of as temporary as being permanent. I will never accept the wheelchair as anything other than a temporary solution. I have legs. I was meant to walk around. I'm a stander not a sitter. A wheelchair completely robs the individual of his or her identity. Mostly, all people see is the chair. I am determined to ditch this thing ASAP.
If you put any part of the word "invalid" in your logo, you're probably not going to move a lot of anything you're trying to sell. It's not hopeful. It's a major buzzkill! Can you tell how I still feel about these stupid chairs? Still hate 'em. I actually like it that this chair hurts my back! It protects my posture and motivates me to get out of it faster! I can put a positive on anything!
All I'm saying is you can put all the nice, "caring" suffixes you want to behind invalid. It's still a wheelchair and you're still the invalid in the wheelchair!
My teenaged son does not enjoy reading. So what do I make him do? Whenever I get the opportunity? I make him read to me of course! Car-trips, gym sessions, doctors' waiting rooms are all good places to "get your read on", in my opinion, and since my opinion is the only one that counts (What do you mean you "don't like to read?" Learn to like it!) all opposing views will be summarily squashed.
Lately, we've been attacking the 9th grade literature syllabus. So we flip back and forth between "Romeo & Juliet" and "The Catcher in the Rye". "Catcher" is pretty easy to decipher, "R & J"? Much more difficult! So as the boy muddles through the Olde English, we let most wild mispronunciations go uncommented on (I mean come on, they don't talk like this on GOT, so who needs it?) but occasionally the lad manufactures a word or two that's unintentionally hilarious!
On our way to a Giant's game in The City we had time to read! Patient Spouse and I lost it because our son somehow derived "Lambicide" (CSI-Lambicide/starring David Caruso, this fall on CBS) where "Lammis Tide" was and "beauteous" mutated into "Bucius"? (a feminine Southern gentleman? A pit bull? Who knows?)
In our frantic paced, over-connected, multiple deviced world "The Bard" can seem antiquated and WTH?
As much as words mean to me, I have to take particular issue with a particular word that's as negative as an adjective as it is a noun - invalid. Whether it is a person in a wheelchair or the validity of your driver's license nobody wants any part of either kind of invalid. It instantly negates the person/document/whatever as worthless and illegitimate.
Despite my own intense dislike for them and out of absolute necessity I got a new wheelchair. It's the same basic, stripped down model I had before and I hope will be very temporary. In the meantime I was cleaning the wheels and peeling off the stickers when I came across the company name and logo - Invacare. It might as well be subtitled "Where Dreams Go To Die!"
Any wheelchair represents an acceptance of physical limitations I think of as temporary as being permanent. I will never accept the wheelchair as anything other than a temporary solution. I have legs. I was meant to walk around. I'm a stander not a sitter. A wheelchair completely robs the individual of his or her identity. Mostly, all people see is the chair. I am determined to ditch this thing ASAP.
If you put any part of the word "invalid" in your logo, you're probably not going to move a lot of anything you're trying to sell. It's not hopeful. It's a major buzzkill! Can you tell how I still feel about these stupid chairs? Still hate 'em. I actually like it that this chair hurts my back! It protects my posture and motivates me to get out of it faster! I can put a positive on anything!
All I'm saying is you can put all the nice, "caring" suffixes you want to behind invalid. It's still a wheelchair and you're still the invalid in the wheelchair!
When I visited England in 1982, my route included a small southern coastal rather medieval hilly town near Bournemouth. Outside a shop on the sidewalk was a 3-foot statue of a little blonde girl in a leg brace, with a money box to contribute to "Support the Spastics." A holdover from the polio epidemics, no doubt, perhaps the major need for wheelchairs in years gone by. Americans elected and loved Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his WC (polio in the 1920s), congress had to pass a law to keep him from being elected in perpetuity for life! I'm assembling a biography on the late Susan Peters, 1921-1952, a wonderful actress and keyboard talent, who spent her last 7 years in a WC, paraplegic from a hunting accident, but that didn't stop her from doing radio shows, producing and acting in her "Sign of the Ram movie in 1948, doing off Broadway theatre to rave reviews, and her own NBC television show "Miss Susan." In the latter, she was a "ironsides" type lawyer solving other peoples problems. She divorced and was active in dating, and had an adopted son. But in those days, they only had penicillin, sulfa was new. SHe dies of chronic urinary infection complicated by pneumonia, yet her epitath magazine articles were fond of saying, "she gave up."
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