Wordless Wednesday
Press 1 for …
Since I speak a creole originally from an island nation, I have an angle.
I took French in grades 7 and 8. My first teacher was Madame Volkenharrrrrrrrrrrrrr who spoke Frahnsh with a combination of rolled Rs and glottal stops. I can still count in French and curse a little but my seventh grade average was a C. I attained Ds the next year.
Sensing a bad trend, I switched to Latin in ninth grade.
That seemed like a wise choice. My mother took four years of Latin. My grandfather and grandmother took four years of Latin. You have to start in grade 9 to fit in four years of Latin. I really really wanted to do that.
My second year French teacher also taught first year Latin.
Uh oh.
Yeppers, I earned Ds in Latin.
Sensing a bad trend, I switched to Spanish in tenth grade.
Aced it. Senora Reagan even called me “Querido Ricardo” in my yearbook. Wrote a nice note there. I think she wished me good luck.
Spanish is a vital language in home life, business, culture and politics in South Puffin and even up north around Miami in the United States. The Miami Herald reports that “one might expect a good report card there when it comes to the quality of the Spanish being spoken.” But the reality that educators and linguists face every day is “an atrocious Spanglish”; they want to clean it up.
I have a better idea. Why don’t the Spanish speakers just learn English?
My friend Nola “Fanny” Guay bridled at that. “There’s no shame in pidgin languages and they help foster a sense of tribal belonging and community among those. It also fosters separateness, which is probably why ‘mericans and educators/linguists want to clean it up. Preferably they’d foster belonging to the fuller community,” she said.
Nope. The paper reported it correctly as Spanglish. Pidgin is a more simplified language that traders construct from pieces of their common languages plus some new words like finiptitude they make up to fill in the gaps. Most people learn a pidgin as a second or third language as they need it. The South Florida Spanglish, on the other hand, incorrectly uses actual Spanish words plus Spanish-sounding English cognates; they end up speaking badly, adopting bad habits from the shared tongue, and trying to keep what-they-think-is-Spanish as the master language.
So why don’t the Spanish speakers just learn good English?
“‘zackly,” Ms. Guay said. “It’s okay to have your own lingo. It’s better to know what the rest of the people around you are speaking, and to communicate with them clearly. Useful, you know.”
Perhaps those educators and linguists feel guilty about English dominance and want to further fragment American society. After all, America grew strong because people could love a country that accepted them and taught them its language and customs.
I called English a creole. Old English grew first as a pidgin as the islands assimilated the Iron Age Picts, Angles and Saxons and Gaels and Danes and Romans. It became a creole language when a generation of English children learned it as their first language and later became a mother tongue in its own right. It is still the most adaptable of languages, free to accept words and rules from other tongues.
And now we have to Press 1 to speak it.
I’m perfectly happy doing business with you in this country if your robotic auto-attend asks me politely to Press 1 for Spanish or French or Moonese. As long as the default selection is English.
Premte Peeves
A fellow with a Macbook started to use my extension cord at the airport but found he brought the wrong charger. Oh, well. That’s probably why I have to travel with a “cables and chargers ditty” that takes up a quarter of my carry on and drives TSA scanners crazy.
Here’s the thing. I have three cell phones (yeah, yeah, two are out of service or about to be), an iPod, a PDA, two cameras, two laptops, and an electric razor. Really. Not one of them has the same plug at either end.
I don’t want a $39.95 “universal charger adapter” gizmo. I have a bunch of those. They work for some gadgets some of the time. I want to plug into one place with one cord with one end onnit.
Ya know, every alarm clock, desktop computer, electric tooth brush, monitor, refrigerator, table lamp, television, and bug zapper I own plugs into the same 120VAC receptacle.
There’s no reason all the 5-12VDC device makers can’t collude to do the same damn thing.
Wordless Wednesday
Exchange?
Jody Beauregard is a sweet, gentle man who has worked on Tom Ripley’s garbage truck for a decade or so. Before that, he schlepped shingles up ladders for Dean Russell when Dino still had his business in North Puffin.
Providence smiled on Jody three years ago. He scored an indoor job with dental insurance and regular hours. First time he had ever worked 40 hours per week and with a building contractor, so he got to see the “comfortable” end of the construction business.
Until the comfortable got dissed in the meltdown. The contractor laid him off a year later, on his 65th birthday.
Jody didn’t mind too awful bad. He was collecting Unemployment and had enough quarters in to retire. He likes to take off every fall to hunt anyway and expects to put up enough meat to last him through the year then but retirement, ah retirement, would let him feel more relaxed at deer camp.
Or not.
Jody collected about $280/week in UI but he also qualified for $1,286/month net in Social Security. And, of course, he qualified for Medicare. He signed up for Part B. He was in double dipper’s clover. Until Unemployment ran out. And the Unemployment extension ran out. And the extended Unemployment extension ran out.
Early last year, the Great State of Vermont decided to “give” him some medical coverage and to pay his Part B Medicare insurance premium. He was in pig heaven. I’m a pretty fair reporter but I still don’t know how he got on Vermont’s Health Access Plan (VHAP) list or what the requirements are.
It’s an elegant, enchanting, thought-provoking system. In August, September, and October of last year, for example, Social Security charged Jody nothing for his Part B coverage. He was still receiving Unemployment compensation during those months. In November, Social Security deducted the Part B premium from his check. He has received no Unemployment payments that month or since. In December, Vermont paid the Part B premium. In January and February Social Security deducted the Part B premium again but some time last year, he got an unexplained $142 extra deposit from Social Security. Confused yet? I am. The premium Jody pays Vermont has also bounced around, month-by-month, between $15 and $50 per month with no explanation.
A Vermont minion told Jody that the reason the state is not paying his premium anymore is that he “makes too much money.” And yet, his unemployment ended in October and his Social Security check — his only income — is unchanged for the third year in a row. No COLA, doncha know.
They have yet to send statements or bills to him. He has asked for but never received an Explanation of Coverage so he has no idea what the $15 (or $50) he pays each month buys him. Vermont has an sensational online presence but no account Jody can log in to, so he has never known how much the premium for the medical coverage they give him is. “I’m pretty sure it is the Plan B I signed up for plus prescription coverage,” he told me. Sheesh.
The Vermont rep told him he makes too much money but still won’t tell him what poke he gets for his pig.
These are the very people who want to run our car manufacturers (and other businesses) and our statewide health care system.
Gov. Peter Shumlin wants to set up a Health Insurance Exchange. In exchange for what?
“Exchange” as a verb usually means to trade someone one something for a different something else that person has or to replace (perhaps defective) merchandise with its working equivalent. As a noun, we say it is that same something that was given or received as a substitute for something else. Sometimes an exchange is a place, like the Stock Exchange, for buying and selling commodities or securities. That kind of exchange is typically open only to members.
Vermont lawmakers got their first thorough look at the guv’s plans for his beloved single-payer health care system last week. Mr. Shumlin plans to start this year by setting up the same state health insurance exchange the constitutionally-challenged Obamacare calls for.
Mr. Shumlin wants more. His state health insurance exchange will help drive the last commercial insurers out of Vermont and serve as his springboard to moving the state to a single-payer system in micro-steps. This year, he will create a new Vermont Health Reform Board not to control health system costs but rather to dictate how much the state will pay providers for services.
The administration will not unveil its financing plan for the new system until 2013, two years after the system is in place.
Perhaps one year after Mr. Shumlin is no longer in place.
“It’ll be good, Mr. Dick,” Jody Beauregard told me. “I can exchange my plan for something even better.”
Uh huh.
Remember Jody’s experience. Guess who made his life so easy? Happy Valentine’s Day, Jody.