And I got to thinking about the concept of teaching people how to write, and the inherent problems involved, and I started making notes and by the time all the marks were in, I had enough material for over half a dozen posts.

But they’re not funny. Some are explorations into possible lectures, others examine the continuing damage caused by the Five Paragraph Essay, and others are provisional class activities. And to top it off, they’re all about teaching.

So I started a new blog: “I Probably Don’t Like Teaching.”

I invite any who are interested to drop by “I Probably Don’t Like Teaching” and find out why.

When visiting St. Catharines, be sure to visit the scenic Falls and Skylon Tower.

It seems I made a couple of mistakes in my last post. Most of these were the result of four glasses of wine and include a new spelling for “thinking” in which the semi-colon plays an important role.

The major mistake, however, had nothing to do with alcohol and can be blamed entirely on my well-deserved reputation as someone with little or no clue of where he is at any given moment.

It turns out I wasn’t in St. Catharines, as I so confidently stated.

I was in Niagara Falls.

So maybe there were some clues that I missed — but I just thought the constant sound of rushing water was the shower of a hygiene-obsessed neighbour.

Okay, I made that up. We weren’t close enough to the Falls to hear or see them, but when we went out to dinner on Sunday night I couldn’t help noticing that in the three-block walk to Swiss Chalet we passed by three sexy lingerie shops and half a dozen motels.

And when I was outside having a cigarette, I saw a tower that looked exactly like the Skylon Tower in Niagara Falls and wondered why St. Catharines would build something so derivative.

Yes, in retrospect there were a few hints I should have picked up on — but what can I say? All I really knew was that I wasn’t in Toronto: and when I’m not in Toronto, my actual location is pretty much irrelevant.

We’d gone to St. Catharines (actually Niagara Falls) for a couple of reasons. One, of course, was a final get-together with our friend, Joe, who is leaving for California next week. Another was so that I could teach him a few things about the computer. He’s okay at sending e-mails and stuff, but needed some guidance on more complicated operations.

We stayed overnight on Saturday, sitting up until late drinking wine, talking about the past, and watching the Beatles documentary. (Did anyone else notice how much they aged over eight years? They start out as little more than teenagers, and by 1970 they’re looking like men in their thirties.) The next day, Sunday, Joe and I worked on the computer while my wife went out to do some shopping.

The plan was to return to Toronto that night because I had an early class on Monday, but by the time my wife came back, we’d missed the last reasonable bus out of town and the next one would get us home well after midnight. So we stayed another night, and got up at 4:00 in the morning so I could get to class by eight.

I made it, but I think we got about nine hours sleep over the entire weekend.

Anyhow, I’m back in Toronto, thank God, and the universe is back to normal.

I do think the city could do with a few more sexy lingerie shops, though.

I’m drunk.

Well, I’ve had several glasses of wine, so I’m not entirely sober.

Sober’s a funny word. It’s actually from the Latin sobrius. “Se” means “without” and and “ebrius means drunk. The actual origins are unknown.

That’s probably because they were drunk when they came up with it.

In any event, I’m in St. Catherines (Ontario), and I’m staying the night and my host had several bottles of wine.

Some of these bottles are now gone. Well, the bottles are still here. The contents are gone. Where they’ve gone is a bit of a chemical mystery, but some of it has been turned into pee.

I don’t often get drunk. I don’t like it much. Fucks up my thinking. I prefer a joint.

Can I say that? Joint?

Anyway, the alcohol has affected my t;hinking processes. What’s worse is my host only has Internet Explorer. I don’t like that. I prefer either Firefox of Chrome. Both of them check my spelling as I go along. My spelling is generally atrocious.

Anyway, my host is going to be going to California. He’s moving. He’s packed up all his books and is going to California. After he’s gone I have one more friend, and in April that friend is going to Mexico. That’s a whole other country. (Well, so is California, but somehow America isn’t quite as much another country as Mexico is.)

That leaves me with — hold on while I count on my fingers — uh, carry the zero — that leaves me with no friends. I somehow haven’t made any new friends in a while and now I find that’s a bit of a disadvantage. Cause now I don’t have any.

Shit.

That sucks.

On the plus side…I’m drunk. I’ve had four glasses of wine and now my head is all screwed up. Plus? This keyboard is weird.

Well, what do you expect from someone who uses Internet Exporer? Of course he’s got a fucked up keyboard.

So anyway, I just wanted to say — don’t drink alcohol. It makes you do stupid things like post idiotic things to your blog.

I’m going to go back and pretend I know what people are talking about.

I just wish it took more than four glasses of wine to get drunk.

Actually, what I really wish is that I’d had a joint at the beginning of the evening. Then I wouldn’t have had the wine. I woudn’t have a headache tomorrow. And I wouldn’t have poisoned my body.

Plus I also wish my last friends weren’t moving to foreign countries.

Not that Angel.

Somewhere out there is a man who believes I’m an angel. And I don’t mean one of those wimpy angels whom everyone knows is just some mortal Good Samaritan who does a good deed and then modestly walks away without giving his name. (“Oh, he was like an angel come just at the right moment to save me from that bus!“) No sir! In the unlikely event that I ever do a good deed, I bloody well want newspaper and TV coverage. And I’m going to make sure they spell my name right.

No, when I say he thought I was an angel, I’m talking about the real thing: a supernatural creature with magical powers.

One of my few strengths is the ability to improvise. This often kept me out of trouble when I was a teenager. For instance, during lunch hour in high school, I would take the record player they used in typing class and set it up in an empty room. There, two of my friends and I would eat lunch while listening to Procol Harem and Grand Funk Railroad. I always got the record player back to the class room before the teacher arrived, so nobody ever missed it.

Except once. I’d just set it on the desk and was plugging it in when typewriting teacher walked in.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

I picked up the arm, pointed to the needle, and said, “There wasn’t anything really wrong with it. The diacrystal just came loose.”

Now, I have no idea what a diacrystal is, nor why that particular word came to mind — possibly my mind was reaching for piezo crystal, but was unable to find it due to the chaos created by the panicky creature running around in my head.  In any event, it worked. The teacher immediately became conciliatory, said she hadn’t realized there’d been a problem, and thanked me profusely for fixing it.

Cool.

But as neat as that was, at no point did she mistake me for a supernatural being.

That came later.

It was shortly after I’d moved to Toronto. I was working in the exciting field of Mobile Promotional Communications Distribution — or what the uninitiated call “door-to-door leafleting.” It was around November, early morning after a cold night. There was still frost on the ground, but the day was going to be warm, and although I was wearing a long, black coat, I had it open with the leaflets clutched in one arm against my chest.

Remember that image of the long black coat. Open. Kind of like a cape.

Not that Sparrow

I came across a young sparrow shivering on the sidewalk. Figuring that if I left him there he’d either freeze or become breakfast for a neighbourhood cat, I picked him up and tucked him behind the pamphlets. Not long afterwards, I came across a guy about my age waiting for a friend to pick him up outside his house. We talked for a few minutes, and then I walked on.

I’d gone about fifteen feet when I felt the bird starting to flutter. I stopped, turned, and when I’d caught the other guy’s eye, I opened my arms in a dramatic fashion and the bird flew out of my chest.

The look on his face is one I’ll never forget for as long as I live.

Years later I actually joined the IBM (International Brotherhood of Magicians) through Toronto’s Hat and Rabbit Club (Ring 17) — but nothing I’ve done since that cool November morning could ever top the feeling I had when, for a brief moment, I truly felt magical.

Still, sometimes I think of that young man, now in his 50s, sitting alone in front of the shrine he undoubtedly set up to commemorate his visitation from an angel, and I have to admit — I feel a little guilty.

Look, Bob. I can make the cursor move up and down!

I’m in a rush so I hope this makes sense, but I’ve got to do something other than write comments like, “I think you mean, ‘Children can be very suggestible,’ not ’salable.’” Or “I’m not entirely sure that Perez Hilton is a reliable source.”

Anyhow — I really like the show Mythbusters. Partly because I have a strong commitment to facts — such as whether a cannon made entirely out of duct tape can fire a cannon ball (it can) — but mostly because I like seeing things explode.

It’s surprising how many common beliefs are actually myths.

Coca-Cola can dissolve a tooth overnight.

Myth.

Hair and fingernails continue to grow after death.

Myth.

George Clooney is better looking than I am.

Myth.

Plus? That last one is kind of hurtful.

But the myth that’s bugging me the most right now has to do with young adults and their computer savvy.

They don’t have any.

"Pull my finger" is not considered the best opening for an elevator pitch.

I was sitting in on a colleague’s class. I didn’t really want to. It’s a long story. But the point is, it’s a class where students learn how to get jobs. They learn about networking, in which every form of human interaction is turned into a business contact. They learn about the “elevator speech,” a particularly annoying self-promotion in which you talk someone’s ear off for the length of an elevator ride — or until they call security and have you evicted from the building. And of course, they learn about the proper way to answer questions in job interviews.

The woman teaching the course is nice enough. I think. Truth is, I don’t feel like I’ve ever met her. She’s always “on,” which gives me the feeling that I’m talking to a movie extra desperately trying to land The Big Part.

Some of the advice is not bad. The majority is at least non-objectionable. But a good chunk of it is total balderdash.

Take the interview questions, for instance. She’s a big fan of questions that “shake things up,” as she puts it.

“When I’m interviewing people,” she said, “I like to find out things about them other than just their skills, so I’ll ask questions that really make them think, such as, ‘If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?’”

“I’d be an autumn tree,” I said, “and leaf.”

Okay. I didn’t say that. I just thought it.

But really! Isn’t that the kind of question they used to ask teen idols in Tiger Beat magazine?

“David Cassidy, tell me — if you could be any kind of animal, what would it be?”

When I first applied to J. Walter Thompson back in the mid ’80s, this kind of question wasn’t yet popular. But even then, some of the questions struck me as being a little on the dumb side.

“How do you handle pressure,” my interviewer asked me.

I thought about it. I knew what I should say — something like, “I try to keep a cool head,” or some such drivel. I just couldn’t do it. So I asked, “How is everyone else handling it?”

Another question, and the one that actually got me the job, was, “Why do you want to work at an advertising agency?”

Well, the truth was, my career as a commercial artist and freelance ad copywriter was pretty much dead, and I was willing to take a job washing windows if it paid the rent. However, while I might not have been particularly sophisticated in job interview answers, I did know that saying, “I need the money” wasn’t what he was looking for.

So instead I said, “Because I always wanted to tap dance on a desk.”

He nodded, still looking at his sheet of questions.

Then he stopped nodding and looked up.

“What?”

“Well, when I was a kid I saw this movie with Donald O’Connor where he worked in an ad agency. They landed this big account and he tap danced on the desk. I’ve always wanted to do that.”

The upshot is that I got the job. And at the end of my three-month probationary period, the guy who interviewed me came into the office with these plastic clicker things to attach to the the heels and toes of my shoes, and made me get on the desk and tap dance.

Those were good days.

But there was a point in here somewhere and I seem to have lost it.

Oh, yeah. The dumb class and the dumb interview questions

During the class discussion, one girl whined (and I use that word only because it’s completely accurate), “What really bugs me in an interview is when they ask me, ‘Are you computer literate?’ I’m 20 years old! Of course I’m computer literate!”

Oh, bull pucky horse dirt!

This idea that the young are automatically knowledgeable about everything to do with computers is complete and utter hogwash. They can download music. They can play computer games. They can watch YouTube.

But computer savvy? Myth. Big, big myth.

Every semester I waste at least two classes labouriously going over and over how to double space, indent paragraphs, insert a header, put in page numbers, change the font, and set margins. And yet when I ask about it at the beginning of the semester they say they already know this stuff because they’ve taken the Computer Skills course.

They’ve been working on computers all the way through grade school. During four years of high school they use computers to write their essays and projects. At the end of it they come to college and take a Computer Skills course.

And they still can’t figure out how to indent a gorram paragraph!?

They can use Google to find out about movies and musicians, but when it comes to looking up actual information they haven’t got a clue how to frame a search phrase. And if they do,  they consider  ”Bill’s Ranting Blog Against Everything” as a reliable source. When  prospective employers (or peer rivals) discover the drunken party photos they posted of themselves on Facebook or their blog, they’re shocked and horrified.

“But that was private!”

Right. And if you close your eyes, nobody can see you.

Computer savvy my ass.

Now I’ve got to go back to correcting papers.

Let’s see, this one’s arguing for gay marriage.

“You can’t always say that something is wrong unless it effects other people, and gays getting married isn’t effecting anybody besides it’s not like it’s anybodys business anyways.”

Which reminds me of anther myth:

Young people can articulate their thoughts quite clearly.

Myth!

Cultural trinkets

While marketing is important, we should always keep in mind its cost to culture. News shows are cluttered with spots which amount to little more than promotions of consumer goods; snack food advertisement has been credited with the increase of obesity among children; and educational institutes have find themselves engaging in various degrees of product placement in return for funds.

But nowhere is the influence of marketing felt stronger than when the commodity being marketed is the culture itself. This can clearly be seen in the case studies of two separate cultures which, as a marketing device, turned to their own heritage.

Earl Bergamot

“Admittedly, tea has always played a large and important role in our culture,” says Earl Bergamot, who is better known as Gaffer, “but over the last few decades it has grown out of all proportion. The only things tourists are interested in these days are the tea-related items: handcrafted tea-pots, coasters, strainers — that sort of thing. Sometimes they’ll pick up a couple of the ankle bells we wear for traditional dances, but only because they’ve seen us dancing on TV.”

Artisans who create in-demand items find themselves doing a thriving business, and certainly no one is complaining about the much-needed infusion of foreign dollars into the economy. The downside, however, is that many of the other, and equally important, traditional art forms have gone into serious decline.

“Our religious artefacts have all but disappeared,” mourns Bergamot. “I think there are only two artists still producing black-velvet paintings. Our heritage is suffering.”

The second case study involves a culture forced to reinvent its history in order to disassociate itself from characteristics which may not be conducive to the marketing of its products.

Shop Steward Earnest Keebler

“We’re supposed to be cute, ya know?” says Shop Steward Ernest J. Keebler of the Keebler elves; but the cigar-waving figure seated across from me in the office of a large cookie factory is a far cry from his TV persona frequently shown gently encouraging his helpers.

The Keeblerites came into their cookie heritage many centuries back. Representing the losing faction in a civil war fought over labor issues in 1345 AD, they were exiled from the North Pole and forced to start a new society further south. But while they had little in the way of resources, they refused to compromise their most precious principle. “We work, we get paid!” says Ernest, summing up the Keebler philosophy. “It’s as simple as that. We didn’t give in to the f—ing fat man in the red suit and we’re sure as hell not going to give in to anyone else!”

Upon founding their new country in 1347, they were then faced with the challenge of finding a new line of work.

“All we knew was, like, wooden toys, see?” says Ernest, laughing. “Then when the plague started breaking out all over Europe we figured: what the hell — let’s make cookies.” Starting from scratch was no easy task, however.

“Of course, we didn’t know the first thing about cookies, and all our early recipes called for a lot of saw-dust.” Ernest leans forward conspiratorially. “We still make the saw-dust cookies,” he says with a smile. “We just sell ‘em to the dorks in the health food store. It’s amazing what those guys will buy!”

But public image isn’t the only problem facing the Keeblerites. Once a year, after the filming of his popular television, the Cookie Monster beats his annual, month-long retreat to the Keebler valley.

“Man, oh man!” groans Ernest. “When that guy hits town we all know it. And when he brings that a–hole friend of his, Barney, it takes us a full month just to fix the place up again.”

While solutions may yet be a long way off, simply acknowledging the problem is a step in the right direction. The question is, will the cultures be around long enough to benefit?

The pathos of the situation was brought home to me at the end of my interview with Tetley Tea’s Earl Bergamot. The solemn little man took me into a local church and pointed out an empty alcove. “Until it was broken a few years ago,” he said, “there used to be a beautiful plaster-cast bust of Elvis in that space. It still hasn’t been replaced.”

He shook his head sadly. “Our culture is dying.”

Because they are chronologically linked, but appear in reverse order on the blog, I’ve moved the Trial of Injustice posts to their own separate page: The Trial of Injustice.

Plus, I really don’t feel like they’re my best work and this way they’re kind of hidden.

I don't think this is what Blake had in mind.

Okay. I know that many people who visit this site do so because they were looking for something unrelated and, thanks to the democratic anarchy of Google, end up here instead. Searching the Internet can sometimes be like rooting through your kitchen cupboards for a can of beans and running across the entire cast of Gilligan’s Island.

Years ago, my old clippings and resume site received the greatest bulk of its traffic from people looking for “chicken art.”

I never knew whether they were looking for art created by chickens, or art with chickens as its subject matter. Either way, anyone doing the search would find my site within the first five hits.

Of course, the reason was fairly straightforward. One of my clippings was an article I’d written about Ottawa artist Rob Thompson’s performance art in which he caged two people for a week to protest the living conditions faced by commercially raised chickens. I was completely unbiased and respectful in my analysis, and even compared his work to that of such post-modern artists as Abbot and Costello.

This, apparently, was good enough for Google to give my site a high standing in the search order. After all, it involved chickens, and it involved art.

Those days are long gone, however, and while I’m sure a search for “chicken art” will still turn up that particular piece, it’s buried somewhere deep inside 99,000 hits.

More recently, I’ve had visitors looking for “bookcase hidden connectors,” “sexual perversion + golden shower,” “horror movie disembodied arms head,” and even “who wrote the book of love.”

A funny thing about that last one. I wrote a post a while ago in which I answered various questions posed in love songs, including “who wrote the book of love.” In it, I made up the history of a Jeremy Sichmore, a county clerk who wrote a book about the rules of love. Pure fiction. Never meant to be taken seriously. But yesterday I discovered that someone had come to my site through a Google search for  ”jeremy sichmore” and “book of love jeremy sichmore.”

What the hell?

Well, I did the search myself and discovered that in a forum on Canadian Track and Field, someone named “trackspike” had posted a list of “totally disconnected comments/questions:”

1. Where is Megan Brown?
2. What does “leg taped up” mean for Tamara – will she finish the season in good form?
3. Moscow Idaho is at 2600′ elevation, Kingston is 200′
4. Where is Paula Findlay? (I agree with Ron that of course TRI runners can’t really run, but she is at least as bad a tri runner for the women as Whitfield is as a man (-;
5. Who wrote the Book of Love?

I presume the last question was purely facetious. Nevertheless, another member of the forum, “roseyrunner,” answered it with the complete text of my made-up story.

Cool.

But if I thought that was strange, today I learned that someone had found me through a search for “bring me my bowl of burning mold.”

Bring me. My Bowl. Of burning mold.

Now what…I mean, how would you…that is to say…huh?

Why would you burn mold in a bowl? If you did burn mold in a bowl, why would you want it brought to you?

I can see burning a house with mold (or mould). In fact, this past summer, Ann Arbor firefighters (apparently having read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 a few too many times) were scheduled to set fire to a house for just that purpose.

Firefighters will burn mold-infested house in Ypsilanti Township
by Cindy Heflin
July 22, 2009

Ypsilanti Township firefighters will burn a vacant house on Verna Avenue because it is infested with mold and would be unsafe to demolish by tearing it down, a township official said.

“We’ve been advised by the experts that the only safe way to abate the mold is to burn it,” said Mike Radzik, head of the township’s Office of Community Standards.

You see? A house, yes. A bowl, no.

But I think I’ve puzzled out the mystery. In William Blake’s “Jerusalem,” after the poet wonders if Jesus had ever walked “England’s mountains green,” he goes on to say:

Bring me my bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire.

I suspect someone has badly misremembered the words to this poem and was trying to look it up.

Of course, I have no way of knowing who this person was — but I have a hunch.

I think it was Jeremy Sichmore.

Is 104 F high? For a temperature, I mean.

For a human temperature.

Did you know that this week is Intersession Week?

What a dumb name. “Intersession Week.” As in “inter,” meaning “to bury,” and “session,” meaning “a Celtic music jam.”

The eighth week of the semester is called “Intersession Week” and there are no classes. Apparently because we’re supposed to bury Celtic musicians or something.

For me, it was to be the week during which I could get caught up on stuff and maybe even take my wife out to a move. I’m thinking The Vampire’s Apprentice. Or maybe The Men Who Stare at Goats. I read the book a few years ago. Actually, I read both books a few years ago: The Vampire’s Apprentice and The Men Who Stare at Goats.

Anyway, I was going to do stuff and see stuff this week.

Instead, I’m sick.

I’ve been trying to deny the fact, but reality keeps interfering. The only way I can function at all (and by “function” I mean standing up and walking across the room) is by taking copious amounts of Tylenol 1. Now there’s nothing wrong with taking copious amounts of Tylenol 1. It has a lot of codeine and codeine was given to Mankind by God as a compensation for giving us the ability to feel pain. So Tylenol 1 is good. Tylenol 3 is better, but you need a prescription for that.

The only drawback to taking copious amounts of Tylenol 1 is that you tend to forget what you were supposed to be doing.

Unless that’s caused by the fever.

Is 104 F high? For a temperature, I mean.

For a human temperature.

Did you know that this week is “Intersession Week”? That’s a dumb name.

Apparently even Kindergarten kids get Intersession Week — at least according to Mrs. Abraham’s Ant Pile. That’s a blog Mrs. Abraham runs for her Kindergarten class. So far, Mrs. Abraham’s class has learned the letters Mm, Ss, Tt, Rr, Pp,Cc, and Aa. When they were learning about the letter Aa they baked an apple pie. Mrs. Abraham’s kindergarten class sounds like it’s a lot of fun. There’s also a picture of Mrs. Abraham on the site. She’s very cute. I bet all her students are in love with her. Probably half the staff, too.

Whatever I have, it isn’t the flu. I refuse to have the flu. I especially refuse to have the Swine Flu. Not going to happen. Every night on the news there are more apocalyptic warnings about the Swine Flu. I’ve gone through too many apocalypses in my life to pay much attention. First there was the Hong Kong Flu in the early ’70s, and then in the mid ’70s there was our first run-in with the Swine Flu. Everyone had to get vaccinations. Very scary. More people died of the vaccinations than of the Swine Flu itself. And then there was the Bird Flu, and West Nile something or other. Plus, back in the ’70s we were told we were going to run out of food by the year 2000. I guess we’re all starving now.

The point is, I don’t have the Swine Flu.

I do have a lot of Tylenol 1, though. Good stuff.

Is 104 F high?

You should check out Mrs. Abraham’s blog for her Kindergarten class. Last week they made edible spiders from Oreos, pretzels, and red hots.

Oh — you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to go take some Tylenol 1. And then I’m going to stare at goats.

Wait. Does that sound right?

Not long ago, JohnnyB, an American, dared to complain (on this very blog) about my use of Canadian/British spelling — specifically, of the letter “u” in various words such as “colour” and “honour” (comment section of Getting rid of a mould infestation in four steps).

Granted, the English language is not one of the world’s more logical languages.

We’ll begin with box, and the plural is boxes.
But the plural of ox should be oxen, not oxes.
Then one fowl is goose, but two are called geese.
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.

To add to the complications, when speaking metaphorically we often use the “wrong” form of the plural. For instance, we would say, “Those two dancers are bumbling around like a couple of oxes,” not “a couple of oxen.”

On the other hand, we wouldn’t say “those two are as clever as foxen,” rather than “foxes” — so it’s not like it’s a general rule or anything.

So I’ll admit that English has its spelling peculiarities and that I have a little bit of sympathy for those who want to simplify it.

After all, English speakers are just about the only people who having spelling bees because if you asked the speaker of some other language how to spell a word, they’d look at you and say, “You spell it the way it sounds, you moron.” Except, of course, they’d say it in that other language.

But before you get all indignant and blameful and stuff about English, remember this: it’s not our fault.

It isn’t. English is actually as logical as any other language. The problem is, the language we speak — that is, the language we know as “English” – has almost no English in it. In fact, depending upon which authority you ask, English makes up only 1.5% to 2% of our language.

Are you getting that? Almost 98% of what we speak is not English.

Ironically — while most of the words we use aren’t English, English has the largest vocabulary in the world.

It all started when Rome invaded in the first century, bringing with them roads, baths, and the Latin vocabulary (since the Romans hadn’t yet devolved to speaking Italian.) When they left a few centuries later, the Danes invaded, bringing with them horned hats, delicious pastries and the Danish vocabulary. When the Danes were finally beaten back, England started to pull itself together linguistically. And then we were invaded by the French, who were cleverly calling themselves “Normans” so people woudn’t hate them. (It didn’t work.) With the French came rude service, butter sauces, and the French vocabulary.

Although English had struggled some during the previous invasions, Norman rule almost wiped it out. French was the language of the courts and all official business, and Englishmen with any standing at all made sure that they learned the language. Basically, the only people still speaking English were the serfs. Even this wouldn’t have been so bad, perhaps, but along with their language, Normans also brought feudalism: a repressive cultural institution in which peasants were restricted to one plot of land. This meant that travel became exceedingly rare. As a result, while the English language changed (as all languages do), there were no longer lines of communication linking these changes together. As a result, it changed in random directions all over the country, and a serf from one village may not be able to understand a serf from another village 25 miles away.

Fortunately, the English language (which by now consisted of Latin, Danish, and French) was saved by its greatest ally: The Black Death.

When the plague killed of more than a third of the workforce in the 14th century, the serfs and peasants suddenly had a bargaining advantage. They got to travel, and those in power actually started to learn some English in order to speak to them.

Over the next century, the English beat back the Normans (who gave up on trying to get people to like them and started admitting that they were French). The next step was putting the English language into some kind of order, but that wasn’t an easy task what with so many different dialects.

So for a “standard” we turned to London which had been around since early Roman times (not to be confused with early Times Roman), and through the centuries had developed a kind of street language combining elements from a large number of dialects.

From this point on, English started to develop into the language we know today.

The spelling, however, was all over the map.

Samuel Johnson reacts unfavouably upon discovering that he'd misspelled "honour" and "colour."

Of course, few people noticed this until the printing press came along and people like Samuel Johnson started publishing dictionaries. To bring some semblance of order to the spelling, words were spelled more or less according to their language of origin.

For instance, our spelling of “honour” and “colour” reflects the fact that these words are from the French, a language that often spells words with “ou.”

Not, however, “honour’ and “colour,” which they spelled honore and colore. But many other words in French are spelled with “ou” and so we stuck it in these words as well.

Oh sure, if you want to be technical, it’s what you might call a “mistake” or an “error.” Picky people might point out that it’s an “inaccuracy,” a “miscue,” a “goof-up.”

But so what? It’s a long-standing tradition, and it allows us to make subtle distinctions between two meanings of the same word.

Take “mould” for example. In British/Canadian spelling we have two words: “mould” and “mold.” This allows us to make a distinction between the stuff that grows on your walls when the hot-water tap won’t shut off (mould), and something that can be used as a form to make something (mold).

And then there’s “check” and “cheque.” When Canadians want to make sure something is right, we “check” it. But when we have to pay money to someone, we run away, change our names, and move all our assets to an offshore account.

Failing that, we write a “cheque.”

And then there’s — uh.

Well, there’s… .

Okay, so there aren’t any more. But that’s not the point.

The point is, we spell various words with an extra “u” because it’s a mistake we made a long time ago. But we have the proud blood of the English and don’t knuckle under to pressure merely because something that we’ve been doing for hundreds of years isn’t right. We have principles. We have integrity.

We’ve laboured on our mistakes, and we have the honour to stand by them, damn it.

And that makes us colourful.

So lay off my “u”!