Tuesday Summer tip #4

Being a Word Nerd
I love my Ipod. I don’t work on a Macintosh, I am not an Apple Geek. But I think Steve Jobs was a genius to create the Ipod, and re-create it and re-create it. Nothing wrong with improving the design and functionality of an invention.
As I have mentioned before I grew up listening to my mother’s talking books. As an adult she would loan them to me and the specialized listening devise so I could read unabridged books. These recordings could not be listened to on normal cassette machines. Talking books are recorded at very slow speeds, the speaking voice does not need the Hi-fidelity that music does. The talking book takes a normal cassette and records 4 tracks so you flip the tape 3 times to listen to all 4 tracks. A normal unabridged book could take up to 15 tapes. Thus a special devise had to be used to listen to the hordes of books for the blind that the National Library of Congress had in their halls.
In the 1990’s a new wave of book readers were evolving. People were stuck in traffic and wanted to use the time wisely. So the everyday person started looking into talking books or as they are called now Audible books. Don Katz founded Audible.Com in 1997 and thus brought digital audio books to the masses. Easily played on your computer. In 2002 Audible.com created the digital format to be played on the new Ipod. Shortly afterwards I became a member of Audible and an owner of my first Ipod. Now I no longer had to raid my mother’s bookshelf for my talking book fix.
Slowly, during this same period of time, podcasts were being developed. First, as if often the case, it was a secret world for geeks and radio snobs. But now we find podcasts in ever form including video casts (Vidcasts). These also play on my Ipod. In fact I am a podcast junkie. The percentage of Podcasts and audible books on my Ipod are disproportionate to the music on it.
Where is this leading. . .to the Word Nerds. Three teachers in the Virginia area have a podcasts which takes a family of words and discusses them. They teach middle school kids so they are very aware of possible crude content and place warnings on their podcasts. This program would have been a favorite of my mother’s if she were still with us. She loved the word. . . .any word. She was also a prolific writer. I have published poetry she wrote in the 1st grade up till her death. Words were her way of seeing the world since her eyes could not.
During the hot summers Mom let us kids learn about her Word World. My brother didn’t appreciate it as much as my sister and I. I think my brother was dyslexic, but we didn’t know it back then.
Each week she would have us take out the big Webster dictionary, shelved alongside the Collier encyclopedia set. And had us open and point. We were to pick out 5 words and during that week learn the meaning and use them.
To this day I can vividly remember learning what Filigree and binnacle were and can use them.
So. . . this summer, help your kids become word nerds. Listen to talking books with them. Listen to Podcasts. Find new words in the dictionary. You will make a teacher happy this fall, and you could help your child open the world of words that can carry them well into adulthood.