Bradley Allen

Elevate me later (so many fortresses and ways to attack)

A nature study of life in the wilderness of San Francisco, sharing coffee and tea with friends

“ sneak (verb) Its origins are shrouded in mystery … From the beginning, and still in standard British English, the past tense and past participle forms are sneaked. Just as mysteriously, in a little more than a century, a new past tense form, snuck, has crept and then rushed out of dialectal use in America, first into the areas of use that lexicographers label jocular or uneducated, and more recently, has reached the point where it is a virtual rival of sneaked in many parts of the English-speaking world. But not in Britain, where it is unmistakably taken to be a jocular or non-standard form. — Is ‘snuck’, as the past tense of ‘sneak’, a real word?

To determine if I had sneaked (or rather, snuck) into art school.

I made up a student ID number and posed as a 3rd year film student “working on independent projects” and pretended to sign up for letterform classes… all to gain access to their Vandercook letterpress and metal and wood type collections. While the real ~~misunderstood geniuses~~ students slept, I printed through the night. This went on for some time, and I never ‘got caught’ by the authorities.

But despite the continuing uneducated jocularity, living a lie was not something I aspired to. So I began to confess to certain (trusted) staff and grad students. It didn’t make me feel any better when the typical response ranged from mild amusement to, “Oh, that’s so cool!” Like I was a post-something or other conceptual artist.

Eventually I got fed up with myself and made it back to the Bay Area. Besides, the thought of growing up to be like Jeff Keedy driving a red Miata still haunts me.