Independent, Good, and Clear

I need to schedule the next quarter of Pop-Up classes, and I decided to organize them around some questions my clients havebrought to my attention with regards to the big, wrong-headed Facebook "SWI" groups. Lordy, it's a lot of material.

The groups are mostly full of promotions, class schedules, newsletters, ads for books and Teachers Pay Teachers, pithy quotes and memes, and random requests for money (like Go Fund Me).

There's really no word study or any study at all going in in there.

What's there is just plain old errors, false information about language, or links to false information in other resources. These are provided as though they are authoritative, and they go unquestioned. There are also claims made with no evidence about both morphology and etymology, just to post an answer. Sometimes, the person posting an answer has misunderstood the question and gives a misguided answer to a question no one asked, ignoring the actual question in the process.

I have examples of all of these in this post. Why? Because error analysis sharpens our thinking and contributes to our linguistic gestalt.

Whenver I post about errors in those groups – and this predates Shameless Spelling – someone will often write me to complain that I've exposed them making a careless mistake. They're typically defensive and embarrassed. This happened just a couple months ago, when I wrote "Fac-Ups," even though I didn't write anything anyone said that's not already visible in said groups. If caught in a factual error, I was in a hurry is a poor reason for said error; in fact, one of the points I made in "Fac-Ups" was that if you don't have time to look something up and verify your understanding, perhaps don't share it with 6,000 other people until you do. What's the rush?

The study of language is not a foot race; one's orthographic personal best is not timed. Instead, when mistakes are exposed, including mine, I think the mistaken party ought to say, Wow, thanks, I'm glad to have that corrected, or the like. Often in the Facebook groups, people seem hurried or even desperate to offer an answer whether it's a valuable one or not. When an answer is not offered quickly, the question will sometimes be repeated or reposted, as though the perceived objective of the group is to supply answers to whatever the question is.

This got me to thinking...what makes an answer valuable? An I decided to build my (northern) summer Pop-Up classes around that consideration:

July: Independence Day: Where do Suffixes Come from and How do we Know? This Pop-Up will clarify homophonic suffixes, like the <-ant> in pendant and the <-ent> in independent, and why they're different. It will also take a look at some resources offering lists of prefixes and suffixes recommended in the SWI in the Classroom Facebook group, and why they are terrible. Can we ever make use of lists of suffixes, and if so, how? Are they ever reliable?

August: Word-Forming Elements: How to Tell What's Good. This Pop-Up class will start with <eu>, as in euphemism, and consider whether it's a prefix or a base element, and how we can tell. Doug Harper calls it a "word-forming element." The Mactionary calls it a "combining form." The Facebook groups call it a "base." We will examine other mostly Greek elements and their morphological nature to develop a theory of morphological identification.

September: A Clear Picture of Vowel Digraphs. September's Pop-Up stems from a group admin answering (wrongly) a question that no one asked because she misunderstood the asker. We will consider words like pronounce~pronunciation and clear~declare (and their relationship to eclairs and to éclaircissement, the winning word at this year's Scripps National Spelling Bee), and we'll suss out where the extra vowel letter in one of the words comes from, even though that's not what was asked.

Dates and times are below: