Four Letter Words

Hillary recently made the news for being critical of today’s young folk, for whom she says work is considered a four letter word. She then had to apologize to her daughter, who took umbrage at the notion that her generation considers work a four letter word. Hillary – a bachelor’s degree from Wellesley and a law degree from Yale. Chelsea – a bachelor’s degree from Stanford, and a masters degree from Oxford. Hatcher posed the question to his four-year old son Jake – how many letters in the word “work”?: W (1) – O (2) – R (3) – K (4) – four letters. Jake aspires to one day go to kindergarten, but apparently by the transitive property he is smart enough to have four prestigious degrees. If I can swing him a Swift boat purple heart for a scrape suffered from a fall, and push through an amendment to lower the eligibility age for President to 6 by 2008, he will be as qualified as any Democrat – both the geniuses and war heroes.

As an aside, I always find it funny when people have some sense of their identity tied up in their generation. But the funny thing here is the generation that proudly claims the woman dispensing the criticism. There has never been a more self-righteous, spoiled, and mediocre generation in American history.

I don’t know if Hillary and Chelsea have problems counting or problems spelling, but my guess would be they have problems with both. Beyond that, Hillary has a severe problem with trying to project an image that she is not completely humorless. No doubt she delivered the line to get some laughs, and hopefully the crowd of graduating collegians saw the humor in her inability to count or spell.

Of course, the Hatcher has his own history of spelling problems. In 8th grade, I was chosen to represent St. John’s parochial grade school in the Camden County Knights of Columbus spelling bee, where I first met and squared up against Kentucky John Wolf. The first word to the Hatcher, and this is a true story: “economics.” Of course it was pronounced with a definitive schwa sound on the first “o”, which I promptly turned into an “e.” I was in good company, though, because all but two of the dozen or so contestants choked on their first word. Kentucky John was one of the two still standing, but ended up losing to some kid from St. Rose in the end. Maybe the seed was planted then with my sense of Catholic-instilled guilt that I should punish myself for n long years studying economics in exchange for choking. I’m just glad the word wasn’t “proctology.”

Hatcher is off to Hawaii – the garden island of Kuaii – this Friday. No kids. Yeah for me. No blogging. Not that there has been much lately anyway.