1. This morning, the experienced traffic tv newscaster said “expecially”, catching me off-guard. I didn’t know she had it in her.
2. Setting off a memory of an English teachers’ conference at a round-table meal during which a newbie said “eck-cetera” and all the other experienced teachers looked aghast at one another.
3. Boy were my wife and I surprised in a seminal 1969-70 CanLit course when the old school prof ended his class on Leonard Cohen by playing his “One of Us Cannot Be Wrong” on record: “I lit a thin green candle to make you jealous of me”. It’s a spoof of the conventional mournful love ballad with Cohen’s voice singing off-key at the end, disappearing into a final abruptly cut-off strangled cry. Very funny and fun to have been there to hear that played for senior English students on a small still-conservative city campus by a middle-aged prof who had taught Margaret Laurence and known many other early Canadian writers of old.
(the all-purpose 1966 ‘bible’ textbook we used that year featuring writers from the 18th century up to Leonard Cohen and Gwendolyn MacEwen)