U-Turn

This week for catch-all Friday, I decided to post another personal essay of mine: U-Turn.  I think at times it’s trying to hard to be deep, and there are things I want to change in it, but it expresses some thoughts of mine that I’ve been wanting to post for a while.  I was happy to re-find it while looking through my files today.  At the suggestion of

raisinfish

, I’m going to post the start of it here, and then if you’d like to read the rest, you can click on over to my web page to check it out.  As always, I’d love to hear any comments.  Post them here or email me.  Toodles.

U-Turn

I attribute much of my success in school to Walt Disney. Of course I never had the chance to meet the man, but I’m still finishing what he started. Hours of my childhood spent watching Bedknobs and Broomsticks and Pete’s Dragon have formed a habit I just can’t kick. So I’ve decided to embrace it. Elder Anderson, my mission companion in Weimar, liked to quote his soccer coach. “That which does not destroy us makes us stronger.” It’s hackneyed philosophy, but it works for the task at hand.

One period in my History of the English Language class, Professor Oaks got started on another one of his infamous tangents. He would always get started discussing the homework, but he would end up talking about linguistic studies on dialect or sociology. Did you know that the original pronunciation of “ask” sounded like “ax”? Or that “apron” used to be “napron”? As usual, that day’s departure didn’t have much to do with Old English, but as with most of his digressions, I learned more from it than I did from the rest of the lecture. “Everything is learned in curves,” he said. “To go forward, you need to go back.”

Keep Reading