Welcome to TBO.com. Skip directly to: our Keyword Search, Section Navigation, Content.

TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

TBO.com - Tampa Bay Online

Welcome to Thinking Out Loud, a blog that contains postings from The Tampa Tribune’s Editorial Board and from various Tribune Community Columnists. Unlike the unsigned editorials that represent the newspaper’s institutional voice, the blog postings offer personal perspectives on the issues, personalities and events of Tampa Bay. We invite you to participate by posting your comments. We’ll do our best to respond.

Contributors:

Joe Guidry

Joe Guidry is the deputy editorial page editor of The Tampa Tribune. He is a Tampa native and a graduate of the University of South Florida. He is married and has an adult son.

Jeff Stidham

Jeff Stidham grew up and lives in Bartow. He has been with the Tribune for nearly 22 years, the last 10 on the editorial board.

William Yelverton

William Yelverton is a Tribune editorial writer who has worked for the paper nearly 22 years. He lives in the Dade City area.

Jim Beamguard

Jim Beamguard is a Tribune editorial writer. He is a native of North Carolina and a graduate of Davidson College. He and his family live in Brandon.

Jackie Papandrew:

Jackie Papandrew is a freelance writer and editor. Her syndicated humor column appears in publications in the United States, Canada and India. She lives in Largo with her husband and children. Visit her website at www.jackiepapandrew.com.

Camille Beredjick

Camille Beredjick is a senior at Chamberlain High School, an avid musician and a scribbler with a quirky sense of humor. In the fall, she will be attending Northwestern University to study journalism, political science and music, and she plans to pursue a career in journalism.

Jim Harnish

Jim Harnish is in his 17th year as Senior Pastor at Hyde Park United Methodist Church in Tampa. He and his wife, Marsha, have two daughters and two grandchildren. He is a graduate of Asbury Theological Seminary and received the honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from Bethune-Cookman University. He is the author of six books and numerous articles and studies. He enjoys playing with his grandchildren and cheering for the Florida Gators.

Angela Hunt

Angela Hunt is a novelist living in Pinellas County with her husband and two 220-pound mastiffs.

Sheryl Young

Sheryl Young was a Tampa Tribune Community Columnist in 2005-2006. A freelance writer since 1997, including the Tampa Bay Business Journal, Tampa Style Magazines, St. Pete Times and nationally in Better Nutrition, Today’s Christian Woman and more. She’s received a First Place Amy Foundation national "Roaring Lambs" Writing Award, and has lived in Tampa Bay with her family for over 20 years.

Christie Gold

Christie Gold teaches English and journalism at Freedom High School in Tampa where she advises Revolution, the school newspaper. She has been both the Hillsborough County Teacher of the Year and Florida Journalism Teacher of the Year. She lives on a small farm in Wesley Chapel where she trains as a competitive equestrian.

Natalie D. Preston

Natalie D. Preston is a karaoke singing, only-child pouting, Seminole Tomahawk waving, newlywed bride blushing, 50-state traveling, girlie girl who loves to shop, read, run and jump up and down on her soapbox.

Fernando Figueroa

Fernando Figueroa is a researcher, educator and lives in Riverview.

Gary Beemer

Interests include humor, politics, economics, community and world affairs, finance, people, religion, music, sports, current events, the arts and education.

Nicole Yunger Halpern

Nicole Yunger Halpern is an undergraduate at Dartmouth College, where she studies everything she can get her nerdy little hands on. Desired major: life. No, not necessarily biology. Life.

Kris DiGiovanni

Kris DiGiovanni is a Tribune Community Columnist, Huffington Post contributor, Daily Kos diarist, and teacher, who recently moved from NW Hillsborough to another planet - a small beach community in Pinellas County. She also blogs at www.sandscript.wordpress.com

H. David Braswell Jr.

H. David Braswell Jr. is an Information Systems Professional. He is a native New Yorker and a lifelong NY Giants fan. He attended college in California (Cal State Northridge) and moved to Tampa in 1998.

Sean Marcus

Sean Marcus teaches creative writing, journalism and reading at Chamberlain High School. He has one son and is expecting a daughter in early March. He can be reached at wuizabug@gmail.com

Most Recent Entries

Thinking Out Loud

Monthly Archives

From Lancaster with “Love”

Posted Dec 25, 2011 by Nicole Yunger Halpern

Updated Dec 25, 2011 at 08:20 AM

The first time I heard the word, I shook myself as though having caught a pie in the face after stumbling upon a food fight. My parents had called me “sweetie,” parental types had called me “honey,” and southerners north of Tampa had called me “sugar.” None of these experiences, though, prepared me for the electronics-store clerk who called me “love.”

Sweatshirted and gangly, he pronounced the word so it rhymed with “drove.” The pronunciation came part and parcel with the noun—for I’d just moved to Lancaster, Lancashire, United Kingdom.

Lancaster hunkers beneath a perpetual rain cloud three hours north of London. The Floridian in me shivers here, the New Hampshirite gambols about without a hat, and both agree that I need a larger umbrella. What the city lacks in sunshine, it compensates for in sunniness: Within ten days of arriving, I received four invitations to meals at people’s houses. And store clerks call everyone and sundry “love.”

Although I came to conduct physics research, Lancaster’s lingo has intrigued me as much as my condensed-matter reading has. Locals call my host institution not a “university,” but a “uni.” As I used to own a virtual pet called a “uni,” references to the school stir up guilt about my having neglected the animal for a decade.

“To splash out” means not “to venture outside, i.e. into the puddle that is Lancaster,” but “to splurge.” Thank a hostess for your use of her “bathroom,” and she might protest: “But the bath is upstairs, and you used the downstairs toilet!” The term I thought I’d hear more in Britain than in the States—“Happy Christmas”—hasn’t shown its face.

Many of us don’t notice the conversational cobblestones that we tread till they shine but that trip up listeners. At the public-speaking club I used to frequent, commentators identified “filler words” with which presenters peppered speeches that needed no spice. Common fillers include “um”; “like”; “and”; and my golden calf, “so.” Uncommon fillers include “in principle”—a favorite of a physicist I know.

Physicists qualify with “in principle” statements that we could qualify with “in practice” if we weren’t too lazy to justify the latter qualification. For example, I can measure the mass of a proton (a positively charged particle of the sort found in atoms’ cores) in principle. Having only the foggiest notion about how to weigh protons, I might not obtain a result until some 21st-century Einstein proves that protons don’t exist. But I can bumble through that measurement, given enough textbooks, equipment, and patience.

Physicists usually refer to measurements while saying “in principle.” But, in principle, one could refer to everyday topics—as my acquaintance did: “I could hold extra office hours in principle, but I’ll have to check my schedule.”

Now that I’ve questioned a native about “love,” I barely flinch when addressed by the term. I also look forward to the next linguistic pie I’ll suffer to the face. Lancaster bakeries sell heaps of pies—chicken-and-mushroom, steak-and-kidney, mince. I have as clear a notion of what’s in mince pies as of how to weigh a proton—but learning sounds delicious.