20101203.1248

Amidst meetings with students regarding their grades and why what they turned in to me is, in fact, plagiarism, I have been looking back over some blog entries my friends and I have made. The perspective is quite nice, and I enjoy the kinds of comments that get exchanged.

I also enjoy the occasional text-message, such as one I received from my lovely and surpassingly excellent wife just now. She writes* that a student of hers offered up the funniest and most inadvertently astute misspelling: "If we want to sell imported whine, we would have to find where the rich people live."

Aside from the joke embedded in it--one that I found especially funny, given my experience with the wealthy in my hometown--the comment reminds me of an article from College English 73.2 (November 2010), Cathryn Molloy's "The Malcliché: An Argument for and Unlikely Episteme." In the article, Molloy argues that the misuse of the much-maligned cliché is a way to "transcend uncertainty in ways that make our mortality a bit more tolerable" (147), one that is valuable because its unintentional origin reveals much about the perceptions the utterer has of social structures (146, 149, 151). While I am unsure that there needs to be a new label for the phenomenon (is not what Molloy, following Freedman (139), calls the malcliché already subsumed by the definition of "malapropism?"), I do find myself at least partly convinced by the argument, generally.

What, then, is revealed about the student who errs this way? What is revealed of my wife and myself, who both found the incident funny enough to relate? What is revealed of the reader who reads this, whatever the reaction of that reader may be?

*Is "writes" the correct verb to use to refer to text messages? Should it be "texts," or "messages," perhaps? I do not know, and I would welcome input.