Word usage and self-discipline

A few weeks into my doctoral program at the University of Colorado I was attending my qualitative methods course, which was taught by a professor who had co-written a book on the subject and who, by most regards, was a giant in this methodology. Some of his earliest work were diamond exemplars of how to conduct qualitative methods and produce publishable work from it. He had since moved on to write award-winning qualitative research and cultural studies pieces about aspects of the nuclear defense industry, namely its memorials.

This experience was a vivid one, and perhaps it's a collapsed composite of several warm fall evenings in that lecture room with the sounds of the undergraduates playing music and socializing in the Dalton Trumbo Fountain Court outside our window. I remember him commenting, in an aside to the lecture topic, on the drums wafting in through the room's open window. "New tribalism," he said, and I couldn't help but think that this man was out of touch. But I was just out of touch with him and his ways. And in the process of learning those ways he taught me a lesson about word usage.

At one point during our discussion that evening I engaged the teacher and the class as I had learned through twenty years spent in the classroom by asking a now-seemingly overused question: "Is this a good or a bad thing?" Instead of responding to my question, he responded to my choice of words. He told me to substitute for 'good' or 'bad' 'more useful' or 'less useful.' To me, that seemed like the essence of pragmatism, a distinctly American school of philosophical thought. Not only was he trying to teach me to be less vague but to focus on the use-value of my focal concern. So, for example, if I were to 'go native,' so to speak, in conducting qualitative research, would that be more or less useful given a certain set of circumstances under which I, as a researcher, were to conduct and eventually produce my research? I was, at that time, 25 and at the zenith of my youthful, dogmatic idealism. Elders, such as this man, were equipping me to steer off that lemming's course leading to the asymptote of a dream figure: perfection, superlatives, up, up, away, death--scholarly or otherwise.

As I said, this experience was a vivid one, and adjunct to this classroom moment was one, before class, at my chest-of-drawers, in my home, across town, in Boulder. There, I had taken the last pill from a bottle of Vicoprofin prescribed to me by an oral surgeon who had extracted four 'wisdom' teeth a few months earlier. During a moment of doctor-patient small talk as he stereo x-rayed my head to plan his attack on these four aspects of my wisdom he asked me what I did. At the time, I was a starry eyed intellectual whose future lay before him. I told him that I planned to study organizational communication to which he offered that pat response: "What's that?" I gave him a seemingly sufficient response concerning communication, representation, and workplace identity as they relate to the meaning of the work itself to which he responded: "Well, don't go around organizing hospital nurses because then they'll demand better working conditions and pay." Here was an oral surgeon, of the old school, wearing a somewhat colorful surgical scrub, counting me among his many thousands of extractions, providing a rather gruff and decidedly Midwestern professional's response to what threat he thought I posed to the order of any organization, especially his. I suspected that he mistook "organizational" for "organizer," which isn't far afield of what many can and want to do in my field but who get subverted by the pay coming from the executives who request them as 'consultants.' I wonder where that surgeon is now? He could just have easily retired in Edwardsville as in Florida, I'm sure, handsomely either way. Me? Well, I just took out the trash this morning, and I am sometimes indistinguishable from the detritus of my life. Translation: I am of my shit, unlike Joe Oral Surgeon, who followed a recipe for success and who, through hard work, intelligence, race- and sex-based institutional privilege, and imposing, athletic build bullied his way through school and into his respective field of work. I, the meek and distracted person I was, ended up taking out the trash at 5 a.m., with leftover soup heating on the stove, coffee brewing, cat mewing, and decided that today was not a good day to visit the Ironworker's hall, the access to which was handed to my by my father. Why? Well, I decided that instead of framing my choice in terms of 'good' or 'bad' I decided to frame it terms of use-value, and my god, what I am doing now is so much more useful than speaking to that high school clique known as the unemployed labor pool, sitting at a cafeteria table, "shooting the shit," awaiting a job call.