Fri 26 Jan 2007
When I step into the hot rain of the shower and close the door behind me, I enter some kind of free mind zone and all sorts of random thoughts and memories swirl around me with the steam. I do some of my best thinking in there and while putting on my makeup in the mornings. I’m open to lots of stuff, nearly to the point of clairvoyance. This morning, I had memories of high school.
In 11th grade AP US History, our teacher Mr. Cook stood at the podium telling us what to study for our upcoming midterm, as the class took notes as fast as our adolescent fingers would allow motion (which, if you’ve ever been an adolescent, you know is pretty darn fast, wink wink). “Chapter 6, Roosevelt and the Threat of War, scan that. Also scan the Study Question section of that chapter. Chapter 7, section 1.5, scan that.” And so he went on.
Finally, shaking my hand in pain, I paused and asked him, “Wait — do you mean scan or skim?” Cuz I was NOT about to read that much crap and memorize the big list he was giving us if I didn’t have to.
Mr. Cook looked over at me silently like he was evaluating what level of moronity I had dropped to. “It’s the same thing,” he said, and seemed to visibly fight the urge to end his statement with “duh!”.
“No it’s not, scan is to read over something carefully for the details and skim is to just look it over really fast.”
Mr. Cook stared at me another moment, expressionless. One of the most popular guys in our year, a scholar athlete who just happened to be in my AP History class, yelled out impatiently, “Who cares?!”
“Well, I don’t want to read and memorize pages and pages of material if he meant we only had to skim them!” I said. I mean, DUH!
Mr. Cook walked purposefully to the back of the classroom to his desk. He yanked a big red hardback tome off his shelf, presumably a dictionary, and flipped to a page. He looked down and “skimmed” for a few seconds. Then he flipped over another few pages and “skimmed” a different section. He closed the volume, placed it back on his shelf, and walked back to the front of the classroom in the silence of 32 pairs of eyes. He resumed his position behind the podium.
“Chapter 6, Roosevelt and the Threat of War, skim that.”
I bet you are going to have a few readers pull out their dictionary on this one, too.
you corrected me on the usage of “skim” as well. i didn’t use scan, and i can’t remember what i used, but i meant “skim.”
and “nauseous.”
but let’s not correct that one and laugh at people when they misuse it.
LOL that’s priceless!
Way to stand up for yourself and your study time!!
first of all.. I hate this f’ing laptop sometimes. I’ll have something all typed out and then my finger hits the mouse thing in the middle and makes everything go away… grrrrr.
(don’t tell me to disable the laptop mouse.. I did! .. for months. But then BOTH usb ports went ca ca on me so now I have to enable it.
I, at times, :), use words incorrectly as well, but I’m always taken back by those that do not use they’re, their and there or you’re and your correctly ( I could go on )…. I agree with you on skim and scan and would have argued that one too.
This brings up the whole “further / farther” crap. I was taught years ago that further was always used as “additional” and farther was always used as “distance”. To this day, I continue to use these words in, what I believed, to be the correct context.
“Furthermore (in addition), I think we should add another bus route to our city plan”
“The bus is farther than that, you have to go another three blocks”
You will have people argue with you and say “The bus is further than that” So I’d have to argue with them. (I learned this in high school) just to have a college english professor tell me they can BOTH be intertwined and used as the same in any context.
Hmmmph.
So if you go to a dictionary, basically they ARE intertwined with one another, but I still like MY earlier education in that further is additional and farther deals with distance.
Jordan, you’ve touched on an issue I have with modern day language usage. I don’t like that the more we incorrectly use words, and the more mainstream the incorrectness gets, that we simply “adapt” the language to accomodate that. It’s “wait for” when you’re standing around as someone gets to you; it’s “wait on” when someone is serving you! It’s “different from” because you can’t compare apples with oranges, so it can’t be “different THAN” cuz different is DIFFERENT, it’s not BETTER. I still use “further” and “farther” in its intended context as you do, altho I use “further” when I refer to concepts, not just “in addition.” We can talk further about this and just keep going forever, ya know?
Ok but since you live farther west than I do… and the sun comes up early here… I’ll have to hold you to that on another day when I don’t have to get up at 5 am.. 🙂
Is that a new way? Would you like more of my inventive trend I have a fresh joke for you) What’s the difference between an oral thermometer and a rectal thermometer? The taste.