Surely Shakespeare has a sniglet for it?

By heather on June 21, 2008

Remember Rich Hall in HBOs 1980s comedy, Not Necessary the News?  He created sniglets, words that should have been in the dictionary, but weren’t.  For example:

• Foodgitives: The food on one side of a TV dinner tray that escapes to the other side. (Hall 1985a: 31)
• Furnidents: The indentations left in carpet after moving heavy furniture (Hall 1983)
• Sniffleridge: The groove running between the nose and the mouth (Hall 1984: 92). 

Well, today I’m asking for help in creating our own.

Here’s the scenario: my superintendent and I met on Thursday to discuss curriculum integration using technology and over the course of the discussion she asked me how the recent computer rollout went.  Well, since she asked, I answered.

I said that if there were a word for grateful and frustrated, then that’s what the teachers were feeling.  We were grateful for new computers.  But we couldn’t figure out why they were desktops and not laptops.  Currently, even with our antiquated, 20 lbs laptops, we can still bring them to the front of the room with a stretched out, limbo-esque wire to hook the Internet up to an LCD projector.  We also didn’t understand why, since we have Mac labs and we have programs already in place that require Macs, the district only bought PCs.

So here we are with a brand new Frankenschool made up of PCs, Macs, new Desktops, and old laptops that the teachers are hoarding and pretending that they already turned in because they loose so many opportunities in not having them available.  We don’t have a port near the front of our rooms where we could perhaps use the Internet for our teaching.  We don’t have the bandwidth to support more than 20 students at a time per school on the Internet without slowing down the connections.  And some of the rooms don’t have Internet access at all and aren’t even using computers.  

I said that perhaps, just perhaps, the rollout would have gone better has there been a needs assessment of the teachers prior to any purchases.  

She sighed and said, “yes, I can see where that might have helped.”

I’m not sure whom she is getting her advice from, but as a result, we are a district of teachers feeling very…(insert word for grateful, yet frustrated).

OK, so here’s today’s challenge:  what’s a sniglet that means both grateful and frustrated at the same time?