As you may have guessed by now, I am an unrepentant English major. In 1955, I entered Haverford College, just outside of Philadelphia, as a pre-medical student aiming to major in chemistry, but I soon found that I was reading the chemical formulas for their literary value. I realized that something was wrong; so, at the eleventh hour, I switched to English as my concentration. Ever since, I have earned my bread as an English major.
You know the jokes:
• What do you say to an English major after graduation? “I’ll have fries with that burger.”
• Good news for English majors: They’re raising the minimum wage.
• Don’t laugh derisively at us English majors, or we’ll squirt less foam on your lattes.
One way I earn my bread is by cobbling together “Lederer on Language” for the U-T. This installment completes my second year of loving labor in this language vineyard. I hope you can tell that I adore writing each column. I have blown up the distance between who I am and what I do. When you love what you do, you never work a day in your life.
For me, writing is a re-creation-al joy, like throwing a Frisbee. You can play Frisbee catch with yourself, but it’s repetitious and not much fun. Better it is to fling to others, to extend yourself across a distance.
At first, your tossing is awkward and strengthless. But, with time and practice and maturity, you learn to set your body and brain and heart at the proper angles, to grasp with just the right force and not to choke the missile. You discover how to flick the release so that all things loose and wobbly snap together at just the right moment. You learn to reach out your follow-through hand to the receiver to ensure the straightness and justice of the flight.
And on the just-right days, when the sky is blue and the air pulses with perfect stillness, all points of the Frisbee spin together within their bonded circle — and the object glides on its own whirling, a whirling invisible and inaudible to all others but you.
For me, a lot of the fun of writing is knowing that readers out there — you among them — are sharing what I have made. I marvel that, as you pass your eyes over these words, you experience ideas and emotions similar to what I was thinking and feeling when, in another place and another time, I struck the symbols on my keyboard.
Like a whirling, gliding Frisbee, my work extends me beyond the frail confines of my body. Thank you for helping me to vanquish my mortality. Thank you for catching me.
Next Saturday, May 10, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., Richard Lederer will be appearing at the La Mesa Authors & Artists Festival and speaking at the La Mesa Library at 11 a.m. He’d love to meet you there.
Please send your questions and comments about language to richard.lederer@utsandiego.com