As regular readers know, in addition to my day job as a temp secretary, for the last few weeks I have been teaching a GRE class for what, if I were on, say, Sale of the Century, I would call a Major Test Preparation Company. It is a mild pain to drive an hour into Pittsburgh and an hour back (conservative estimates) to teach a two-hour class, but I have taken advantage of the trips to do other fun things, like hang out with Bill and Terri or eat Mineo's Pizza for lunch. Very good times.

I bring up my class for a couple of reasons. One is that it's clearly one of the major things in my life right now--between the commute, the teaching, and the preparation, it's only behind work, sleep, and maybe TV in terms of my hours per week. I'm enjoying it enough that I will probably continue, and possibly even train to do more tests. The second reason I bring it up is more specific.

DEK and I have this running gag developed watching football this year whereby we refer to problematic things as fraught. "Fraught" always goes with something, and it's never good--DEK's example being that nothing is ever "fraught with puppies". So just saying "fraught!" presumes a "with problems", "with issues", "with danger", etc. "Fraught" has also shown major signs of spreading as a concept, so here's your fraught primer.

Something is fraught when your immediate reaction is "oh, this is NOT going to end well," and something is DEFINITELY fraught when you think, "oh, this is NOT going to end well, and I want to be there to watch." For example's sake, here are some things that are fraught:

• Throwing late over the middle
  
• Getting a tattoo on your face
  
• Your star point guard shooting 43% from the free-throw line
  
• That movie you've been looking forward to being given a January 15th release date
  
• Anything the guys did in the "Bad Idea Jeans" commercial
  
• A People magazine cover story about Robert Downey Jr./Christian Slater/Matthew Perry finally having their life in order
  
• Referencing "Bad Idea Jeans" to anyone under 23
  

So I was preparing to teach a lesson on a Major Standardized Test Verbal Question Type Saturday morning, and one of the points of the lesson was to discern whether words have a positive charge (pleasant, outstanding, Dushku) or a negative charge (abhorrent, tragic, WB). The teacher's edition actually contains definitions of all the words and answer choices, and on one question "fraught" appeared as an answer choice. As I mentally chalked that up to very negative word charge, I glanced at the definition provided, and it boiled down to "abundant, having many". I ask you, are there any other words that mean something so positive but are so negative in connotation, or vice versa? I'd be hard-pressed to come up with another one.

Something that was fraught for me on Saturday was that for half of the class, the only students there were of the English as a second (or subsequent) language (ESL) variety. This is generally not a problem as they are smart people and fairly fluent, but as we know English is a funny language and at times frustrating to understand even for native speakers. I hereby declare "fraught!" any effort to explain the prefix "in-" to ESL students: "So, when you can't define a word and you want to take it apart, 'in-' will tell you that you're looking for the opposite of the root, like 'insensitive' or 'inaccessible'. Except that sometimes instead of 'not' it means 'particularly' such as 'inflammable'." "OK, Joe, so what should we do in this situation?" "Um, let's talk about some strategies for making educated guesses on these types of questions."

(Sigh)