Dear Amritsar,
I was called into my daughter's principle's office yesterday because she had apparently called her Phys-English teacher, Mister Ideominnow, a "dotard." At first, he heard "daughter" and thought she was attacking his masculinity. When she repeated the word - loudly, slowly and with perfect enunciation - Mister Ideominnow gave her a detention. Then, he told the class to turn around while he did something on his computer (I suspect he was looking the word up). Then, he ordered her to the principle's office.
So, Mister Ideominnow likes women named Dorothy. Is that any reason to stagmatize my poor Linda-Lou?
Andromeda-Ann
Hey, Babe,
I was tempted to say, "I do not think that word means what you think it means," but I didn't want to get in trouble with Disney's lawyers (if they don't own the rights to The Princess Bride at the moment, they will...they will), so I stopped myself from doing so. This should be a lesson to Linda-Lou.
A dotard is somebody who studiously collects information, connects the dots representing disparate facts, and comes up with a conclusion that is almost always wrong. Full of convincing detail? Sure. Painstakingly footnoted? Absolutely. But, just not correct. Somebody who answers the question, "Why is the sky blue?" with the statement, "Hillary Clinton's emails!" is probably a dotard. (Demanding that they show you how they connected those particular dots will only cause your head to explode. Trust me on this: I had a 17 Percoset a day habit until I stopped!)
Mister Ideominnow was correct in intuiting that your child was mocking him. Some sort of punishment is definitely in order. I must admit, though, that I fail to see how making your daughter afraid of male deer will make her see the error of her ways.I was trying to explain to my twelve year-old son Faivel Elephantomas that if he didn't eat his fried bacon sandwich, he wouldn't grow up to be Superman. (I cannot explain why he insists upon eating peas and carrots every meal - he must be going through a rebellious phase.) In response, do you know what he called me? Go ahead and guess. No, don't bother - you wouldn't be able to.
A simpering poltroon. That's what he called me. And, if you were, in fact, able to guess that, I apologize for having so little faith in your understanding of the mentality of twelve year-olds.
What I don't understand is: why would my young son think I was a boiling hen?
Tsvi Tuvulanimous
Hey, Babe,
As you may know, poltroons are actually sixteenth century leggings (everything I know about the twelfth to seventeenth centuries I learned from the reality TV show Our Stupid Ancestors). From what I can gather, simpering is archaic Aramaic for "splitting down the middle." While the common definition of the term refers to paying a bill or dividing an opposing army, it is not much of a stretch to believe that it could apply to leggings (especially if they were old enough to have lost some of their elasticity).
So, your soon was calling you ripped leggings. Somewhat obscure, but not especially flattering.
Ah. I see that the Language Corrector Dude is vigorously shaking his head, which means that this explanation is almost undoubtedly totally wrong. So, I went to that neutral arbiter of language usage, the internet, to discover the true meaning of the term.
As you might imagine, it was an insult. Punishment of some description is definitely called for.
The more interesting thing was my realization that the more time children spend surfing the web, the better they are at finding increasingly obscure ways to insult their parents. I suspect that this is not what Tim After-Berners-Lee or Berning-Rubbers-Lee or Bernersing-Chrome-Lee or whatever his name was had in mind when he got the whole thing started!
The best thing to do if your child says something to you that sounds insulting even though you can't quite grasp what it means would be to assume the worst and punish them by blocking them from the internet for a week. That will teach them the meaning of being an exemplary pox on humanity!
Send your relationship problems to the Alternate Reality News Service's sex, love and technology columnist at questions@lespagesauxfolles.ca. Amritsar Al-Falloudjianapour is not a trained therapist, but she does know a lot of stuff. AMRITSAR SAYS: Schmeckler's Farrago is not traditionally a holiday devoted to gift-giving. If anybody suggests otherwise, they are clearly in the pay of Big Chocolate!