They’re San Diego Writers, Ink, a nonprofit organization that is all about writing, writing well, reading writing, and writing. Did I mention writing? Yes? There is also writing.

They’re having a fundraiser called “Blazing Laptops” where participants write for nine hours straight in return for pledges from supporters. I’m shooting to write 25,000 words in that time. Think I can do it? Chip in!

I have a modest goal of raising $250. Maybe $20 from you? It all goes to the organization, which uses it to fund classes, one-on-ones, and the back end of running the org.

Click here to make your pledge to my NINE HOURS of writing.

• If you pledge any amount, I will send you by email what I write during the marathon writing session. Please include your email address in the form.
• If you pledge more than $50, I will print it out on nice paper, sign it with a personal message, and send it to you. Please include your postal address in the form.
• If you pledge more than $250, I will name a character after you in the writing. Probably as a ninja who battles dust-devils and sleeps under beds, and showers while wearing a mask. AND I will send you a hard copy. Please include your postal address.

Blazing Laptops Write-a-Thon 2012 is the fifth annual all-day writing marathon to raise funds for San Diego Writers, Ink. Who can write for nine hours? We can write for nine hours! You can write for nine hours: sign up to be a laptop-blazer.

The mission of San Diego Writers, Ink, is to nurture writers and those wishing to explore the craft of writing, foster a literary community, promote literature and celebrate artistic diversity. This is accomplished through:

• Classes & Workshops
• Readings & Events
• Publication Opportunities
• Writing & Reading Groups
• Community Partnerships
• The Ink Spot Gallery

To become a member, find out more here.

Your support helps San Diego Writers, Ink, offer more great literary programming: exciting new classes, bringing in bestselling authors and buildling our writing community.

If you have any question about the event or the organization, give me a call or drop me a line

Grant Barrett
(619) 800-3348
grant@grantbarrett.com

The first step is a questionnaire.

Its results will be used to create podcasts and blog posts structured around things that really happened when taboo language was used: confrontations, first encounters, eureka moments, learning situations.

Those stories will lead us down cultural and historical paths as we tease out the complicated relationship English-speakers worldwide have with “dirty words.”

Early on we’ll talk to kids about bad words, so I’d love to have your kids answer the questionnaire, too.

Visit “The Long Bleep” to find out more.

If you attend any of these events, be sure to step up and introduce yourself.

April 25 and 26 I’ll be in Potsdam, New York, taking part in the Lougheed-Kofoed Festival of the Arts on the campus of the State University of New York. On Wednesday, April 25, I’ll be speaking during courses covering the origins of language and invented languages, and then having lunch with students at Morey 120. Thursday, April 26, I’ll be on the air on North Country Public Radio, taking calls, then from from 12:30 to 1:30, I’ll be talking in front of the COMP 305 class in Flagg 238 about the radio show and anything else that comes up. That latter class will be open to all students, not just ones taking COMP 305. Then, that night, I’ll give a big talk about slang at 8 p.m. in the Dunn Theatre. It’ll be half lecture, half Q&A, and open to festival-goers.

May 5. Reading at Vermin on the Mount (Facebook page), a reading series that alternates between Los Angeles and San Diego. 7 p.m. at 3rdspace, 4610 Park Boulevard, San Diego. Copious parking in the neighborhood if you go just a little east or west.

May 6. Speaking about our uncomfortable relationship with taboo language at TEDxSDSU, a local version of the national TED talks. TEDxSDSU presenters and performers will find ways to answer the question, “What Have You Discovered?” 6 to 9 p.m. in the KPBS building at 5200 Campanile Drive, San Diego, CA. The whole event is worth attending.

May 14 at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, 10 a.m. I’ll talk on “Language Encounters: People Who Speak Differently.” It will cover aspects of American dialects, language change, what happens when we meet people who speak differently than we do, and some aspects of what the radio show is about and what it’s trying to accomplish. And we’ll do Q&A for as long as everyone has questions. Directions to the center.

May 22 at the Kiwanis Club of San Diego, Bristol Hotel, 1055 First Avenue, San Diego. Meeting starts at noon but I will speak at about 1 p.m.

Would you like to have me speak at your event in your town? Email me. I’ve listed some past speeches and topics here.

It’s 9 p.m. here on the West Coast. I’m just back from an educational forum featuring Michelle Rhee, who used to run the Washington D.C. schools. A lot of the talk was about students, and some of what I heard from other attendees was about “reaching” them.

Over the next couple of hours, until I’m too tired and the typos start becoming more than I can catch, I’m going to answer email from listeners to the radio show and I’m going to listen to voicemails they’ve left.

We get lots of emails and voicemails each episode. As our listenership increases (as it does daily), so does the communication from listeners. Right now we have more than 7400 saved voicemails (we only started saving them last year) and tens of thousands of saved emails. We search those — mine them, really — as we plan upcoming episodes.

I can answer a couple dozen emails an hour if I’m fast and don’t have to do any research. It’s impossible to respond personally to each one, but we try. It’s important that we talk with them and let them tell us what we need to know to be better at giving them what they want and need.

Those callers and emailers are just a small part of the hundreds of thousands of people who listen each week across the United States and around the world. Many of them are children and students. Families listen together on the way to and from church. Children listen in their classrooms as part of their classwork. English-learners of all ages around the world listen in droves — listening to English speech about English speech does double duty. We’re reaching them. We’re educating them. And we’re educating the adults who listen at work, in the car, while washing dishes, etc.

My radio partners Martha Barnette and Stefanie Levine and I set out an educational mission for A Way with Words when we took it over in 2007. In part, we wanted it to be about education, specifically lifelong learning. We also wanted it to be about changing the way people talk about language. There’s more to language than just being pissed off at things you don’t like in the speech of others. Lots more.

We try to do it on and off the air every week. That one hour of radio you hear (54 minutes, really) is backed by many hours of back-office work, station service, listener help, and more. The one hour is the end result of planning, producing, writing, editing, practice, bookkeeping, phone calls, emails, and more.

I explain all this so you’ll understand why, when we reach out into the community and ask for donations, we think it’s for a good cause.

Right now we’re looking at a 50% increase in the cost of distributing our program via the Public Radio Satellite System. It’s the main way public radio shows are distributed and to be there, in that system, is a must. It’s a hard, unavoidable cost.

So we need your help. Until 7 p.m. Pacific Standard Time on Thursday, December 15th, a foundation is offering matching funds for every dollar we’re able to get from you. Will you donate $100 today to help make the radio show possible? If you can’t do $100, please do what you can, but do it before the deadline.

Thank you.

Grant Barrett
grant@grantbarrett.com

Dinner time is a comedy/variety hour. It may include jokes, laps around the table, a puppet show from underneath the tablecloth, made up songs about bodily functions, putting new words to Darth Vader’s march, a trip to the bedroom to make a new puppet, a mid-dinner visit to the bathroom followed by his bare ass on parade as he cackles and refuses to hitch up his drawers, milk bubbles in his cup, role-playing as monster devouring a forest of broccoli or a population of green-pea villagers, attempts to get dessert without having to eat dinner, laments about being too tired to do anything you want him to do, rhyming games, making new knock-knock jokes, trying out new knock-knock jokes, telling classic knock-knock jokes with the intentionally wrong punchline, lying on the floor, sitting in one or both parents’ laps, fishing his hand around inside his mama’s drinking glass, whispering secrets and plots in a way that can be heard by everyone, switching seats, and, more often that should be the case, getting up from a full dinner plate, going to the fruit bowl on the counter, and getting himself a piece of fruit. When you ask him why he had to get the fruit, he looks at you with surprise and a bit of a disappointment at how dense you are. “Because I’m hungry.”

All of that is done with a verve and panache that suggest he’s part Lenny, Squiggy, Ace Ventura, Jerry Lewis, Three Stooges (or five), Abbott and Costello.

Or, really, it’s just that he’s a committed student of borschty, vaudevillian Muppet videos, which he’s watched for years. He’s a huge Muppet fan and also generally puppet-obsessed. I mean, this kid knows the names of the puppeteers from the original show. A lot of them. By sight and by name. Ask him who does Gonzo’s voice. He’ll know. Ask him which characters Steve Whitemire does, either when he was younger or now in the new film. Jerry Nelson? Dave Goelz? He’ll know. I suspect Jim Henson is the person who has come closest to making Guthrie understand what death is. Ah, you mean now someone else has to do Kermit’s voice?

For a long time Guthrie said Muppet puppeteer Steve Whitmire’s name as Steve Whitmore or Whitmark but Sarah, his mama, tells me Guthrie’s come around. I think Steve is of particular interest to Guthrie because Steve looks so young in the early pictures. Guthrie thinks of himself as a contemporary.

Guthrie has other speech production errors that make us smile. Those little mistakes that he isn’t quite aware of — or is aware of but refuses to correct. They show he’s learning and changing. Even though he has long stretches where you can talk with him about any old thing like he’s a stranger in the seat next to you on an airplane, the habitual mispronunciations show that he’s still just a four-year-old boy.

Lemolade for lemonade, which once generated the classic correcting line by Guthrie to his friend Etta, a year younger: “It’s not lemodade, it’s lemolade.” Lemolade is a favorite of his parents. It sounds kind of like limullade. We try really hard not to correct him when he says it. We want it to last as long as possible. When it’s gone, he’ll still be awesome but it’ll be like missing the old Muppet Show at the same time we’ve been enjoying the new Muppet videos and movie.

Team Rex for T Rex. We have repeated the correct version a thousand times. He just doesn’t hear “Tee.”

Monica butterfly instead of monarch butterfly.

Callipitter instead of caterpillar.

Princel instead of pretzel.

Wiff instead of with and at instead of that are common in young children, but they are a part of the larger pattern.

His speech is becoming more adult-like. He listens better, he self-corrects more, we read more chapter books to him (with bigger vocabulary, more complex ideas, and more structured dialogue), and he watches a higher class of shows.

We’ll miss those old words when they go, the same way we sometimes miss the period right after he learned to talk when just about all he would say was, “Dis? Dat?” as he pointed at things. “This? That?”

I love this particular bit:

“H. This much-abused letter in England seems to escape in America. Of course ostensibly hosstennsibly W is a mere grotesque recall to hoss, the word not being popular. The enclitic here, in this here, been here, etc., suffers various changes, as : h’yur,’yar ’yer yere H.”

(The W is the book’s shorthand way of referring to Charles F. Brown’s “Artemus Ward character.” The H refers to Bret Harte.)

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