Welcome back! I hope everyone had a good break, and is rip-roaring to go again. I had planned on stepping down from the paper for this semester, due to several issues, which I won’t go into. Something about this paper though, seems to suck me back every time I think of moving on. This is the last time, however, that I will not be coming back to the Independent as the Entertainment Editor. Starting with the next issue, Jon Gronli and I are switching places, and he will be in charge of this section. I hope he continues to bring diverse articles to keep you entertained. I will be continuing with this column here, but because I hadn’t planned on being part of the paper this semester, I did not write anything for this issue; so, for now, please revisit a column which ran for the April 8, 2008 issue.
Diversional… all right, this is not a word found in any dictionary. I knew this when I named my column. I wondered if anyone would call me on it (especially my English instructors) but the only people who did were my copy editors. They asked me if I meant diversionary. Of course I didn’t. If I had meant diversionary I would have used it and not diversional.
The word diversion is a noun that means ‘that which diverts.’ Divert is ‘to distract, to amuse or entertain’; sounds like something I can relate to and something that many college students need once in a while. Hence, some form of the word diversion was appropriate. Divergence would have worked with the word discourse, if I used a connecting word, such as in ‘discourse of divergence’ but that wasn’t quite right either. Adding the -ary suffix, making diversion an adjective (and a proper English word), would change the meaning to ‘relating to that which diverts.’ Closer, but it still was not quite there. The suffix -al would change the word into ‘action, process.’ So then, diversion becomes a process of ‘that which distracts, entertains or amuses.’
‘Discourse’ technically is defined, according to my word processor dictionary, as ‘a serious and lengthy speech or piece of writing about a topic’; however, it also tells me that it can be ‘a unit of language, especially spoken language, that is longer than the sentence.’ I purposely decided to take the parts of these definitions that I liked and put them together to make the word mean ‘a unit of writing about a topic that is longer than a sentence.’
I then joined this with my already modified ‘diversional’ and my column title became Diversional Discourse. Then I mangled the whole definition that I pretty much made up anyway into – A process of diverting, through a unit of writing, about a topic that is distracting because it may entertain or amuse.
Books, music, movies, theater, video games, food and daydreaming all come to my mind when thinking of things that divert me from what I am supposed to be doing. I have spent many, many hours getting caught up in something entertaining instead of doing homework, or writing my column, which is now two days past deadline since I couldn’t think of a great topic for this issue and wiled away hours doing anything but sitting down to work on it. As I was falling asleep after a long day of doing nothing constructive, except for rehearsal of course, I realized that I could use that for my column.
I certainly hope that I have managed to give you a little break from whatever it is you are supposed to be doing, and that my diversional discourse worked.