De-mentor

Years ago, I saw the saying, “If you can’t be a good example, then be a horrible warning.”  This counsel gave me hope for those many times when I fall short of perfection.  Most of us have role models and aspire to be role models, going back to Greek Mythology when Athena served as a role model for Odysseus and Telemachus in the guise of Mentor.  Recently at work I fell short of perfection again, engaging in what I like to call “constructive mischievousness.” A colleague admired my “wildness” in undertaking this modest act of civil disobedience.  That got me to thinking, if a “mentor” is a positive role model, would a “de-mentor” be a constructively mischievous role model, since “de-“ prefixed to a word means, “do or make the opposite of; reverse”? And if so, have I become “demented”?

Firstly, I must credit my role model, my father, with introducing me to constructive mischievousness, a practice I happily follow.  In my childhood, my father would do silly things like write “dead cow” on the freezer packages of ground beef.  (My mother quickly put an end to that silliness.)

At work, we have an erasable calendar used to reserve rooms.  Evidently, people were erasing established room reservations and replacing them with their own.  Recently, a paper sign was taped to the erasable calendar, reading in Big Black Letters, “Do Not Touch the Calendar.”  The voice of my constructively mischievous father whispered in my ear, “Touch the calendar as you walk by.  Just tap it with your finger.”  And so on many occasions I have engaged in the civil disobedience of lightly tapping the calendar as I pass.

In searching my American Heritage Dictionary, I found that “dement,” meaning “to cause a person to become mentally deranged” or “to lose intellectual power” is the root of “demented,” which informally means “foolish or crazy.” These words come from a Latin root meaning “senseless.”  The suffix “-or” added to a word means “One that performs a specified action.”  In a constructively mischievous parsing of these definitions, then, a person who acts crazily or causes others to act crazily can be a “dementor,” the opposite of Mentor.  In addition, Chambers Slang Dictionary includes and entry for “demento,” citing “the 1970’s radio show Dr. Demento,” and defining the word as “a crazy, eccentric person.”

Tomorrow I will go to work.  I will do the opposite of Mentor, listen to my father’s whispers, and lightly tap that forbidden calendar.  In the spirit of constructive mischievousness, proudly, I will call myself a “dementor.”

LAGNIAPPE:  In the late 1970’s I worked in a costume shop in Baton Rouge.  On Saturdays before the boss arrived, we would put Dr. Demento’s radio show on the shop radio.  The boss immediately would change the channel, not wanting to offend customers.