Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Common usage is incorrect, but, hey, what’s the problem? Yet another headache.

My grandson is a “rising junior.” That means, and everyone in America understands this but me, that he is between his sophomore and junior years of high school. (And he’s 6’3″ tall which puts him far above me, but I digress.)

This is wrong. “Junior” is the noun indicating he is a junior now. “Rising” is the adjective meaning that he, as a junior, is rising to something let rising in the morning and falling out of bed.

But then again, as an AI chattering bot instructs me, “While your grammatical analysis is sound, ‘rising junior’ is an established idiom in the context of American education. It’s a commonly accepted and understood term to describe students in that specific transitional period. So, while it might not be perfectly logical in a purely literal sense, it’s highly functional and ubiquitous in its particular domain.” This is an “anticipatory labeling.”

By gad. The illiterates win again. I get another headache. Where is the aspirin?