Yes, I now have less respect than ever for the little third grade boy who left the "s" out of Thanksgiving and thus lost the elementary school spelling bee to me, a second grade girl. Sore losers just don't deserve any respect. After all, Thanksgiving is a plurality. It is not just all about one person, him. Neither is it about me alone. It is about all of us. We have many things to be thankful for and there are many of us who have cause to give thanks to God. And why would my parents not be proud of me or expect me to hand the trophy that I rightfully won over to him? No, I will keep my trophy sitting on my shelf because it meant something to me even if it is only a little piece of wood and metal, or maybe plastic with metallic paint.
The story is not all about boys. Even our high school valedictorian Leland Bement had to graciously share the platform with co-winning valedictorian Huei Nin-Liu because apparently their gpa's were identical. We do not want to hear any nonsense about our salutatorian Amadeo gunning down either of them. What's fair is fair.
That said, what's fair is fair. Kathy and I should have left The Rover column alone to avoid all this confusion as to who said what. In reviewing it I see there are plenty of typos in there anyway so what was the big deal? Just some nonsense about how we singers should not reach too high or we will get "fly away," which in Spanglish might have been "volado." Whatever. "Volado" is no big deal either, just a slangy use of what should be a verb. Used in the slangy sense as an adverb, the word "volado" does not really mean to fly away. It only means, sort of, "to feel as if one is flying."
So, no, she is not saying that we are going to take flight. She is only saying that we might be tossed aside once we have slipped and fallen. In the thesaurus, this might also be interpreted as getting dumped or set aside.
In a previous column we see this term "sliding away." That also might have been a mistranslation but I don't remember. Was she saying they would end up "volados"? The column was talking about people stepping in a puddle of water and sliding forward as if skating or flying, something that was perhaps done by some people when rain left lots of water on the hall floors but it is very dangerous because you could slip and fall and end up landing on your butt on the wet floor. I think that is what she was talking about although I really do not remember. But if the word "volado" was used, she would have been referring to the feeling of exhilaration that one gets when one is sliding at an accelerated speed on the wet floors.
Did I do that? I do not really remember. I only remember that her Spanglish slangy terms sometimes got removed by us. I'm not sure why. Looking back, it does not seem like such a big deal. It was just that if we made mistakes in our editing she was most unforgiving in going over our heads to complain to Beth and others but that really does not excuse us from compounding the situation with more dirty tricks. Anyway, she got me banned from editing her stuff. I think Kathy might have made the final changes. Kathy hid the original copy somewhere. I really don't remember anything specific. You could always ask Kathy.
