Nobody's Fool: The Importance of Being Educated

As I mentioned in my memoir, I several times used an anecdote from my graduate school days to illustrate the importance of being educated to my writing and literature classes. I explained how after losing an airline ticket in my messy room, I called the airline (United) to see what I should do. I had the little booklet that the ticket came in but had (I learned months later) stuck the ticket in a book and couldn't find it. The airline agent talking to me claimed that I needed to buy a new ticket. When I protested, he said, "If you cash a check for $100 and lose the $100, the bank won't refund your money." I thought for only a moment before saying, "That's a false analogy." I didn't have to explain why it was a false analogy. My use of that phrase alerted the airline employee that I was educated and therefore harder to fool. He immediately gave me the smart person's information, which was that I could charge a new ticket on my bank card and once I had taken the trip, that money, minus a small lost-ticket fee, would be refunded if no one used my original ticket.

When he heard the anecdote, one of my basic writing students said his response to the first comment would have been, "That's bullshit." That response might have alerted the airline employee that he wasn't dealing with a fool, but it wouldn't have said, "I am educated and therefore not to be messed with" the way my "false analogy" response did.

While I approve of using "educated language" to avoid being fooled, I don't like people who use it in order to try to fool the less educated. Recently, I received a letter from the lawyer of the management company overseeing my community. The lawyer was responding to a letter that I had written to my neighbors, calling out our association board. In that letter I had said that I believed the expensive fencing that we had paid for in 2012 should have been paid for with our HOA dues and that we had bought the fencing years (even decades) early. I also wondered in the letter why the board had spent so much money last year (2014) if they knew maintenance costs were escalating, causing them to have to raise our HOA dues by $20 this year. One minor point that I made in questioning the board's credibility dealt with their use of the term "complex" to describe this community of detached, single-family homes and "units" to describe our homes. Anyone reading the letter should have recognized that the terminology point was not important. I even speculated that those terms might be used because our management company deals primarily with condominiums (in fact, it's called the Condominiums Management Company) and not because the board was being shady.

In her letter, the lawyer addressed my concerns about the fencing in a brief paragraph (four sentences) and said nothing about why the board members were spending our money instead of saving it when they knew funds were becoming low. But she went on and on about the terminology. In fact, she needed two paragraphs to explain why those terms were used to poor ignorant Mary. I'll quote the shorter of the two paragraphs: "The HOA is a "planned development" which, like condominiums, are (sic) defined as "common interest developments" in the Davis-Stirling Common Interest Development Act, California Civil Code Sections 4600 through 6150 (the "Act"). Whether the HOA community is referred to as a "complex" or "project" or something else is not a legality; nor is the terminology for identifying the individual residences (meaning "unit" or "lot" may normally be used interchangeably unless). Legal terminology includes the "common area"--referring to the parts of the community which are owned in common--and "separate interest"--referring to the individual homes and surrounding yard areas, depending on the definition of these items in the CC&Rs and the subdivision map recorded in the real property records." The next paragraph, discussing CC&Rs and municipality models, was about twice as long and ten times as boring and unenlightening as the one quoted. After reading those two paragraphs, I thought of a bad old joke from my youth: "I see said the blind man."

If that lawyer thought she could silence this retired English professor with her lawyer jargon, she soon learned that she was mistaken. Her letter to me was almost four pages; mine to her was longer. And when she saw what I did with her words, I'm sure she wished she had written only a paragraph or did what the property manager started doing after I took apart her language (in e-mails) several times, called me. In my opening paragraph, I chastised the verbose (to be fair, I'm verbose, so she may have thought I would appreciate a wordy letter) lawyer for being condescending and unenlightening. In the last sentence of that paragraph, I wrote, "What those opening paragraphs demonstrated to me was that you did not know your audience and were using language to try to intimidate and/or confuse me, a common tactic not only of lawyers but of other educated people who foolishly assume that their audiences are not as smart or as well-educated as they are." In my second paragraph, I let her know that I interpreted English and taught other people how to use and interpret English more effectively for more than thirty years. I also explained that I earned my Ph.D. in a program--Rhetoric, Linguistics, Literature--that created language experts, so I didn't need lawyers to explain language to me, but I could help them use language more effectively. Here are the last three sentences of that paragraph: "What's going on now with the ACA (the healthcare law) is a lesson in how much trouble ambiguous or awkward language can cause. (By the way, the second sentence in your third paragraph is incomplete and therefore unclear--unless what?) So I recommend that once a "planned development" of detached homes is completed and fully occupied you property managers and lawyers stop referring to that community of detached homes as a "complex" or "project" and those homes as "units" or "lots.'"

Since we can always learn more no matter how successful and well-educated we are, I hope that the real estate lawyer learned a lesson about audience and learned never to write a condescending, jargon-filled letter to an English professor. What I learned once again is the value of my education; it's priceless. I may not have much common sense, and I certainly don't know much about real estate or law, but as I said to the lawyer, "I am not intimidated by any document written in English."