Sunday, May 20, 2012

These Are Some Suggested Glossary Terms. We Post Them In Order to Let Our 9 Readers Look Them Over. We Add Glossary Terms Only When Their Usage or Potential Usage Demands It. Clever Defs Help, of Course, But You Can't Believe How Little We Think of So-Called "Cleverness" Generally.

Caring Disability
1. Often confused for an actual learning disability and often exhibited by slowflakes who just can't come up with documentation for the Disabilities office.

Retention Deficit Disorder (RDD)
1. Illness specific to institutions often characterized by student flakeyness. Symptoms include but are not limited to under-enrolled sections, students quitting at the first sign of homework, Dean's firing instructors for flunking students, instructors engaging in pan-handling.

Zombie
1. A faculty member with a wild, raging idea that is usually pointless (but nonetheless political and/or troublesome) who subsequently spreads disease throughout the department with infectious gossip, arm twisting, disemboweling, eating of brains, etc. Usually, those unfortunate enough to find themselves cornered by a zombie report hearing guttural moans followed by attempts at infection and the surprise appearance of other zombies, seemingly from out of nowhere. Frequently, zombie apocalypses lead to the end of civilization as we know it, faculty meetings. Usually the emergence of zombies results in survivors banding together to win the day, or, if infection spreads too quickly, survivors huddling together in the janitor's closet (i.e., the adjunct office). Usually patient zero is a gumdrop unicorn or a silverback.

8 comments:

  1. I like the idea of a caring disabilities.

    By the way, when did we get up to 9 readers?

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  2. I thought RDD was something institutions suffer - not students.

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    Replies
    1. The more important thing is that "Deans" does not need a possessive apostrophe.

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  3. I think we should adopt the term "victim bullies" as defined here:
    Confessions of a Community College Dean: Victim Bullies.

    These are the bane of me and my wife's existences.

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    Replies
    1. How about image bullies? Their battle-cry usually consists of something along the lines of "Our image! Our precious precious image!"

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    2. @Phil: Yes. These are half of the people I'm referring to when I mention "fucktard colleagues." The other half are the people who are polite and respectful enough, but utterly incompetent to the extent that the school would be better off paying them to stay home.

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  4. I tend to think the glossary should be descriptive, defining terms actually in current use, rather than prescriptive/prospective, suggesting terms for possible use, but since I don't look at it for months on end, if ever, I'm not sure my opinion matters.

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    Replies
    1. I was confused because I hadn't seen these in use either. I, too, thought they were terms we had coined and were already using. But I'm not opposed to these (especially the "caring disability"). I just wouldn't go to the glossary to check if what I was describing was already defined if I hadn't seen it used before.

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