When and where: During this past weekend's wedding extravaganza, my sister's sister-in-law arranged for all of us to get our makeup done for the ceremony. As fascinating as this may be to watch the first time, it gets boring fast. So I poked around and found a Time magazine, published Sept 30, 2013. (Fun fact: Time publishes cigarette ads, which I thought was totally done away with. Go figure.) The last article in the magazine was an interview with Richard Dawkins, who specializes in evolutionary biology and coined the word "meme". This year, he is trying to get dundridge to be a new word.
In this article from Prospect Magazine, Dawkins uses dundridge in context.
Level of familiarity: I have never heard this word - after all, it's new to the language. However, I have interacted with the concept throughout my life. And I LOVE this word.
What it means: Dawkins defines dundridge as a person who is bound to rules and therefore makes your life difficult. In the Time Magazine article, he gives the example of a government employee who would not give a person his passport because he misspelled his name - this government employee is a dundridge because he didn't allow for any bend of the rules.
Reflective comments: As I said before, I am completely in love with this word. There wasn't a ton of context around the word in use, however I think I have a strong image of the meaning of the word. I just left a meeting of the district wide 8th grade science teachers in my district. Two of these teachers are great examples of dundridges because they insist on following every rule to the letter. We had a recommended agenda, but several of us wanted to stray from the agenda to share materials. The two dundridges insisted that we get through the agenda first - which was not something we all needed to be in the same room for in order to accomplish. In the end, we only had 15 minutes to share materials - and as a first year teacher, it feels like no time at all!
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