APPRECIATION #80: IMPROVERSATION, etc.

I get embarrassed about what I don’t know. And I think I should know everything. Talk about a recipe for failure. I shouldn’t think like this. I’m getting over it. Me be fallible. I just wrote about collective nouns (Appreciation #78). I started to call them proper nouns, and then plural nouns, and then compound nouns, but I was wrong in all those attempts.

This reminds me of when I was a high school teacher in Hungary. I had a college degree. I had worked for a newspaper. I was trying to write my first book. Dani asked, “What are the different kinds of sentences?” He was asking for help with some homework that his Hungarian/English teacher was giving.

I didn’t know what he was talking about. I said, “short and long.” And he sighed and walked off. The joke was that the American teachers could pronounce everything correctly but they couldn’t tell you the eight moods a verb could be in, didn’t know any Latin, couldn’t tell you what a predicate was, or the different types of sentences. NOTE: Sometimes years later we learn. What he was looking for was simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex. Or maybe it was imperative, interrogative, declarative, and exclamatory. I know now. As an English teacher I usually stick to short and long…

Rough transition here. Imagine gears in a car grinding.

I am trying to find out the word for what a word like improversation is. I guess it’s kind of a compound. Erin McKean has a cool TED talk about how to make up words. You can steal, you can squish them together, and:

Another way that you can make words in English is kind of like compounding, but instead you use so much force when you squish the words together that some parts fall off. – Erin McKean

And that’s where improversation comes in. I think you would call this a blend word. This all brings me back to the show The Office in a scene where Michael shares his philosophy of life with his boss. He starts a sentence and then just keeps stalling, trying to figure out what to say next. Check it out.

He sums it all up so beautifully:

Sometimes I’ll start a sentence and I don’t even know where it’s going. I just hope I’ll find it along the way, like an improv conversation, like an IMPROVERSATION.

Right now, I can’t think of a better way to explain what teaching feels like.