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Over at Writing Tips there is a thread about the legitimacy of the word “learnings”.  I think it’s a stupid and unnecessary word — what do you think?  It’s pretentious; the blog opines that it is derived from “business speak”, where neologisms applied to old concepts are trotted out as original thinking.

The place where I work has begun requiring reports from people who’ve attended educational functions on the company’s dime.  That’s fine, but they have followed a fad and dubbed this report the “Key Learnings Report”.  I quipped in a comment on Writing Tips that they ought to require expense accounts detailing meals under the heading “Eatings Report”.  It would make about as much sense.

There’s a trend to take perfectly good words, add a letter here and a syllable there, and place them into the new vernacular.

Take “competence”, for instance.  In the parlance of health care improvement, we don’t discuss competence, we talk about “competency”, as though using that word somehow enhances the “significancy”, or perhaps the “importancy”, of what we do.

In the spirit of unbridled neologism, I have chosen to call this pretentious, inflated language “pronuncification.”

Has a nice, cynical ring to it, no?

Well, now, check out this guy.  Michael Perry is a homegrown Wisconsin boy who’s made good, but hasn’t let it go to his head.  I’ve read a lot of his stuff.  I first heard about him when his book “Population 485″ was being read on public radio.  It resonated with me.  He wrote about being a volunteer fireman and EMT in the tiny burg of New Auburn, Wisconsin (pronounced “Nobbern” by its citizens).  It’s a great read, and it proved to be my “gateway drug”.

I quickly grabbed everything I could find by him, and read “Truck: a Love Story”, “Coop” and “Off Main Street”.  He also wrote “Handbook for Freelance Writing”.   His writing is habit forming.

He is also a songwriter and musician, and will soon have an album for sale.

Perry’s my new favorite humorist.  He’s not contrived, having come by his strange sense of humor quite naturally.  having grown up on a family farm.  He interviews well, and he tells his own story here far better than I could, and much more entertainingly.

Run down to the bookstore and check out one of his books.  Read slowly — because if you’re a speed reader like me, you will find yourself in the same condition in which I now find myself — having no more of his books to read until his next one comes out.

I have been doing a metric buttload of writing lately.  It was about as stultifying as it gets: an application for a state award for excellence based on the Baldrige criteria.  If you know what that means without looking it up, I feel sorry for you.

I downloaded an excellent program called “Bullfighter” from here.  This program searches through a Microsoft Word document and flags “bulls**t” phrases and buzzwords.  Bullfighter didn’t think much of the kind of writing I was doing for the application.

Well, the application has been submitted, and that task is done.  Now I am free to write about things that interest me, things I want to write about.  Things that wouldn’t inspire the derision of that “bullfighter” program.  But just to be sure, I’m going to leave it installed, to stop me from using words like “leverage”, “stakeholder”, “core competencies” and “alignment”.  Yuck.

Problem is, I’ve spent so much time pounding away at the Baldrige stuff that I’ve forgotten how my “normal” writing looks and sounds. 

I looked at my blog for the first time in a long time and I realize that the snow job I discussed in “Bad Lie” was last year’s snow job.  I had dinner at the golf course last night and walked past the “front nine closed” sign.  This year’s snow job is, if anything, bigger and better.  But I haven’t written any more.

I’m going to fix that.  Soon.

“Front Nine Closed”

So’s the back nine.

The good news? Bar’s open. Well, I don’t drink, but that’s OK because I don’t golf either.

But this place has a Friday night fish fry that can’t be beat. Most of the customers eat their fish as God intended: covered with batter and deep-fried. But the best-kept secret of the Friday night fish fry at the Skyline Golf Course is the baked and broiled fish. First, it’s cooked to order, so it’s hot.

The other thing about the broiled or baked fish is that it’s fresh and it’s delicious. This is about as far as one can get from the ocean, but the fish here, at this little golf course, of all places, is great. The salad bar isn’t bad either.

Best of all, it’s cheap. And all the fish you can eat, and unlimited trips to the salad bar.

People here ask me why I moved here from California. I usually tell them it was because of an irrational fear of tsunamis and sharks. That leaves them scratching their heads. It sure wasn’t for the golf — if I did play, my municipal course of choice would be Torrey Pines.

And it wasn’t for the seafood, either. I miss Tom Ham’s Lighthouse and Anthony’s Fish Grotto. But it’s Friday night, and I’m going to schlepp through the slush to the Skyline for fresh fish and pretend that’s San Diego Bay out there instead of a bunch of snow.

Point Loma and the Pacific from Coronado Beach.

Coronado, California is just flat-out beautiful. It figures in my earliest memories; my family regularly visited San Diego in the fifties and sixties when I was a kid.  The most commonly-seen photograph taken from the spot where I was standing when I shot this is a picture of the world-famous Hotel del Coronado.  I had my back to the Hotel Del, looking out to sea.

This is where I learned to body-surf and to swim in the ocean.  I swallowed gallons of the Pacific Ocean in doing so.

My parents’ ashes are scattered a few miles out on the Pacific from here.  My maternal grandparents’ graves are in Ft. Rosecrans National Cemetery, which is on the seaward slope of Point Loma, the land mass in the center right of the picture.

Coronado is referred to as an “island” but it technically is a peninsula.  It boasts one of the most beautiful beaches on the Southern California coast, and it is that beach from which this photo was taken.

The beach is broad and boasts clean white sand.  There are grassy dunes inshore.  I remember them from my earliest visits to San Diego.  Only recently did my brother, a former Navy Aviator, tell me about the dunes.  They’re man-made, and they crudely spell out “Coronado Beach”.  It’s true.  Look here on this Google Map for a “bird’s eye view” of this.  (Look closely — the letters are upside down from the perspective of Google Maps’ aerial photos).

Someday I’ll get around to looking up the story of who built these letters out of sand, planting grasses atop the letters to stabilize them against the wind that often blows the sand around.  In the meantime, it’s amusing to think of how many times I walked past these dunes, not realizing what they were.  My brother often enjoyed the bird’s-eye, or more properly pilots-eye, view of these crude letters as he flew practice approaches at North Island Naval Air Station, which is where Coronado Island meets the channel leading into San Diego Bay.

I’ll post more pictures of San Diego later.