Seven Red

The first time I taught first-year composition I was completely perplexed by the way the students used the words “plethora” and “myriad.” I’m not alone in this; these are two words that writing teachers usually invoke when they’re ranting about students. I don’t often rant about students, and I won’t here. But I did, at some point, ban the use of those words in my first-year comp classes. I’d write them on the board and say “No.” No plethora. No myriad. You just mean “a lot,” or maybe “a variety.” Of course, the larger point is about inflated prose, on the one hand, and rhetorical appropriateness, on the other. So I didn’t really ban them. Rather, students would have to explain why their use was appropriate for a given piece of writing, etc. I wanted to hear a reason that extended beyond the Microsoft thesaurus, or some strange striving for variety that they learned in high school (I say “a lot” a lot…). But this amounts to a de facto prohibition.

Now for the payback. I think all the students who really loved the look of the word “plethora” on the page, and all the students who felt a jolt of pride at having used “myriad” in a sentence. Some probably even really liked it; it gave them joy and confidence, even if it was awkward and turgid. They’d get their papers back only to see the word circled with the obnoxious margin comment “INFLATED” scribbled next to it. Use a lot, I’d write. Must have crushed some of them. And so, the payback, in the form of babygirl’s “favorite song.”

I said a while back that I really dug The New Pornographers album released last year, and that I had it on a poppy loop for a little while. It ended up in the CD player in our car. I guess it was playing one afternoon when I picked babygirl up from daycare, because she took a liking to it, too. Actually, not to the whole album. Just to one song. Her “fave-it song.” Myriad Harbour.

Me: “Hey, babygirl. What’s your favorite song?”
babygirl: “Mee-iad Hawbuh!”

So, cute, right? My two-year old says myriad, pretty much every day. But this means we also have to play the damn song for her every day. She gets out of daycare and on the way to the car starts asking “Fave-it song? Fave-it song?” When we get in the car, it’s “Fave-it song?” If you try to put on NPR, it’s a tantrum: FAVE-IT SONG!!! If you try to put on any other song whatsoever, it’s all “NO! I no like that! FAVE-IT SONG!!!!” And, to make it even more delicious, as soon as the song ends, she asks, as two year olds are wont to do, “Again?” The cosmic payback. For every student who ever cursed under his or her breath, “My stupid comp teacher thought I had ‘inflated prose’ because I used myriad;” for every student crushed by my sarcastic margin comments on myriad, for every peer review that had students acting as proxy dictators for my little preferences (“he doesn’t like that word…”), I now have to listen to word myriad 40, 50, 60 times a day. You never get away with anything. So, without further ado:

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