Parlance

I got an email today out of the blue that reminded me of a site that should appear here. The site is:

http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/db4r/Vocab.htm

and is an index of evolved theatrical vocabulary that is not really taught in textbooks. My personal favorite is "toblerone" used when referring to a long triangular prism shaped piece of scenery. There's a bunch to add. When I first posted the list I got a bunch more suggested. One of my more favorite new additions would be "Siamese tieline" which is slang for zip-cord (which I guess is slang for lamp cord).

The email today was actually another educator asking about some curious omissions from my index that are actually some of the most widely used terms. The two he asked about were "BFH" and "RCH." BFH can be sanitized to "Big Friggin Hammer." I guess RCH could be sanitized to "Red Curly Hair" but if you ever said that to someone in the industry they would laugh you out of the shop. They are apparently doing some kind of training manual including some of this vocabulary and couldn't really figure out how to deal with the terms that are particularly crass.

I had a similar problem when I started working. Occasionally I would forget where I was and just start talking like a stagehand or a project manager. A teaching expert who observed me called me on it once. Both the person from the teaching center, and a campus sexual harassment counselor both told me that common industry parlance was inappropriate in an educational environment. (I asked them, they weren't busting me.) The counselor told me that her worst nightmare would be going to work with people from a construction site because of the normal behavior of people in the trades. I decided not to tell her that a shop or a theatre during a build essentially is a construction site.

Over the intervening time I have managed to clean up my discourse, although occasionally if I get really into a topic the educational veneer will disappear. I think its a shame we can't really prepare students for what they will hear when they actually get onto a set. Some of the graduates I stay in contact with have commented about the unexpected roughness of the field. But, not everything is necessarily fair game for school. I guess in the end maybe this isn't something that I need to be teaching.