A

Annotate

verb

To add notes to a text or diagram giving explanation or comment. To mark something as worth returning to. I have been doing this since I was seven. It is not optional for me.

→ See also: The Weekly Word, Week 16

Appetite

noun

What you are hungry for — in work, in writing, in life. Not ambition, which is too loaded and too public. Appetite is more honest and more physical. The career question: what are you actually hungry for, versus what you have been told you should want?

Archive

noun / verb

What gets kept, what gets lost, and who decides. Also: the pit of chargers, cables, hard drives, and floppy discs that encapsulates every version of a life you were certain you would want to return to. You were right. You just need to be able to find it.

B

Barely

adverb

Enough. Barely is enough. Barely counts. The year you made it through barely is still the year you made it through.

→ Three Years Ago

C

Calibrate

verb

To adjust with precision. Midsummer recalibration: six months in, what needs adjusting. Teachers planning for fall. Writers assessing the draft. Career people measuring where they actually are versus where they thought they would be by now. You can only be as defensive as the choice you made five seconds ago.

Compound

verb / adjective

Made of several parts. To make something worse. Interest calculated on both principal and accumulated interest. Also: what the mental load of every additional app, charger, and password does. They do not add up on top of each other. They do something math-like and it is compounded.

Cringe

noun / verb

A sign that you grew. It means the earlier version is recognizable but no longer current. It means something changed. The nothing is what happens when you stay so careful that there is nothing to look back at.

→ Generational Cringe

D

Draft

noun / verb

Everything is a draft. The essay, the career, the self. The version of yourself you are working from right now is not the final one. This is not a problem. This is the condition.

E

Efficiency

noun

Not your only metric. If you absolutely hate jarring alarm noises, you are going to want to go for more of like an hourglass. It does not mean there is one size fits all.

F

Fallow

adjective

Plowed but left unseeded for a season. The field that is not planted this year is not wasted. It is recovering. The productive pause. The field resting is the field preparing.

Frankenfine

adjective (Kelly’s)

The particular texture of being mostly okay — assembled from parts, functional, recognizable as fine from a distance. Not a lie exactly. Not the whole truth either.

→ Frankenfine

G

Coming. G has earned this.

H

Coming.

I

Inference

noun

What you conclude from incomplete information. A reading comprehension standard that is actually a life skill. What you infer about a job from an interview. What you infer about a person from their first sentence. What the text does not say that you know anyway.

Inventory

noun / verb

A complete list of items. The process of surveying and recording what exists. An honest accounting of what you have, what you have lost, and what you have been carrying without examining. The inventory is a truth-telling device that bypasses the censor. You cannot editorialize a list the way you can editorialize a narrative.

J

Coming.

K

Kindling

noun

What catches fire easily. What you need before the larger log will burn. The small things that make the bigger things possible — in writing, in classrooms, in careers. What are you kindling right now?

L

Latitude

noun

The angular distance north or south of the equator. The freedom to act within certain limits. The last stretch of summer before structure returns. What you do — or don’t do — with it when you have it.

M

Momentum

noun

The quantity of motion of a moving body. The force gained by development. In writing: a specific physical sensation of forward movement — the sense that the next sentence is already partly written before you finish the current one. Most writer’s block is actually friction applied to something that was moving. Different problem, different solution.

N

Coming.

O

Orientation

noun

The determination of one’s position relative to circumstances. Every new situation comes with two orientations: the one you are given, and the one you figure out yourself. The formal one tells you where the bathrooms are. The informal one tells you who actually has power.

P

Permission

noun

Who gave it to you. Who you are still waiting on. The question of whether you need it at all is the one most people take the longest to ask.

Perspective

noun

What sets us apart in an age where enormous amounts of things are produced and reproduced in ways that are partly plagiarism and a weird AI thing. The way that you envision the world, the way that you see things, the way that you order them, organize them, lay them out, quantify them, call them by name. What gives us our humanity.

Precedent

noun

What came before that now governs what comes after. Legal, historical, personal. The precedents you have set without meaning to. The ones you are still working against.

Q

Coming. Q is hard. Q knows this about itself.

R

Residue

noun

A small amount of something that remains after the main part has gone. Not scar — scars are healed wounds with a story. Not gift. The chemical trace. The thing that changed the composition of you in a way that is not quite damage and not quite gift. It is just there now.

Revision

noun / verb

Not editing. Re-seeing. The structural change rather than the surface correction. Most people edit their lives when what is needed is revision. September is revision season.

S

Synthesis

noun

The hardest thinking skill to teach. Not summarizing, not analyzing — pulling disparate things into a new whole. What do you make when you put everything you know about your life in one room?

T

Threshold

noun

The point at which something begins or changes. The strip of wood or stone forming the bottom of a doorway. There is a specific kind of knowing that precedes the decision. It lives in the body before it reaches language. Most of us know what we are going to do before we admit it. The time between knowing and admitting is where the most interesting living happens.

→ The Weekly Word, Week 1

Tenure

noun

Not just the academic kind. The tenure of any relationship with any institution. How long you stay. What staying costs. What leaving before tenure costs differently.

U

Coming.

V

Vernacular

noun

Every job has one. Every classroom has one. Every family has one. The specific language of a place that outsiders do not have. Voice is vernacular. Learning a new workplace’s vernacular is the real first month of any new job.

W

Coming. W has a lot of material. It is being sorted.

X

Coming. X is not being skipped. X is being considered.

Y

Coming.

Z

Coming. Everyone’s waiting on Z.