New Words from the Field

According to the "dashboard" of Blogger, it's been ten days since I've posted any comments. Our students had tremendous success in Louisville, Kentucky, at the Sigma Tau Delta convention. We won a best chapter and best website award, two students won for writing two of the best papers of the convention, and two students won $4000 worth of scholarships. My goal for next year is for our students to win $10000 worth of scholarships from different sources, not just from the national organization.

In addition to some very bad behavior from certain south central faculty members (one made a student cry through the sheer force of her hateful polemic), I also heard a few innovative (at least to my approaching-middle-age ears) usages. On one short story panel, a student referenced the "Emo poetry we all write in high school" as she explained the point of her story.

I found this term an interesting semantic weakening or generalization. I thought that the qualifier "emo" referred to a musical genre of punk rock, exemplified by Fugazi. Clearly, it's a clipping of "emotional" or "emotive."

So I suppose this young poet intended "emo" to serve as a synonym for "adolescent angst." What I find so interesting is that her usage presupposes a dependence upon the conventions of this genre and subculture for the composition of this type of poetry; those of us with greater age can see that the poetry is simply a function of adolescence.