At Loss for Words

Mom and Dad spoke in a secret language.

So does my house phone (VoIP for those interested). Mere words into this article, it rudely interrupted to snarl. “Lobotomy. Lobotomy.”

I’ve previously mentioned an older resident of my childhood hamlet, one of those men crushed when the wife left, and emotionally unrecovered. He had a speech impediment when combined with abbreviations made his sentences difficult to decipher. Kids, however, learned to understand him and leveraged their translation skills into a private language.

Pity their poor teachers, a common target of childish insults. These days adults can check suspect words and phrases online. AFAIK, many are acronyms but IDK some slang terms. Nut? Seriously? 304 or 403? Make up your minds.

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Back to my parents’ private language when secret codes favored grownups. When adults didn’t want children to understand, parents of a certain era could rattle off conversations, helping to maintain a united front against the young and obstreperous. For example:

“Ettybay usway eanmay (o)otay erhay istersay. Iyay oundedgray erhay.”

Recognize that? It translates as:

“Betty was mean to her sister. I grounded her.”

In early grade school I read everything and stumbled upon Pig Latin. At last, I knew what my parents were up to. It’s dead easy to learn and for me at least, I could speak Pig Latin much faster than I could comprehend it.

And so I waited. (heh heh, maniacal laughter ensued) Next time Mom and Dad spoke Pig Latin at the dinner table, I casually interjected with a comment in Pig Latin. My parents stopped using their secret language. Had I been smarter, I should have pretended I couldn’t understand the conversation.

Igpay AtinLay

Here are Pig Latin rules (although algorithm might be a better word).

1. Detach leading consonants from each word.
2. Append them to the end of the word followed by ‘ay’.
• Thus “perfect children” becomes “erfectpay ildrenchay”.
3. For words with leading vowels, say the word followed by ‘yay’ or ‘way’.
• Thus “I am useful,” becomes “Iyay amway oosefulyay.”
4. Go by sound rather than English spelling, especially in rare instances of writing.
• Thus “To be or not to be,” is written “Ootay eebay orway otnay ootay eebay.”

[Grownups, don’t reveal to Generation Alpha! Eizesay eethay advantageway.]

Final Word

About my outrageous phone. It took a while before I realized it was trying to say, “Low battery. Low battery,” instead of “Lobotomy.”

By the way, the full English version of the above statement, “Betty was mean to her sister,” would more likely be spoken with asperity as, “Your daughter Betty was mean to her sister,” thereby disavowing parental knowledge of begatting DNA, placing responsibility on the other parent.

Uh-oh. Lobotomy. Lobotomy.

---

Punctuated equilibrium. Also capitalized.

I love France, and many of the French, though they can be annoying like anyone else.  I find their language confounding, even as I love the way it sounds.  One of my good friends is fluent, as is my niece, and I’ll always marvel at their achievements.  The problem with French, to me, is there are far too many vowels, which to my ear all sound the same.  Though while I understand virtually nothing French people say, I respect their determination to preserve their native tongue, to maintain it exactly as it is for all eternity.

I also think they are completely, foolishly and historically wrong in this, though you have to admire their grit. 

The term Lingua Franca means universal language, which it used to be, but not anymore.  This is because they refused to let the language evolve, and thus the world passed it by, in favor of my language, English, which almost everyone on Earth knows “a leetle.”

I learned this traveling around Europe and other continents, and working with people from all over everywhere.  I’d ask if they spoke English, and they’d all say “a leetle”, and then display a mastery of the form far surpassing most of the knuckleheads I grew up with in Philadelphia, Pa.  USA. 

The secret of this success, aside from being spoken by the predominant global military/economic powers of the last two centuries, is unlike French, we could care less about preserving linguistic purity.  If French has the moral rectitude of Mother Superior, English would embarrass the Marquis de Sade.  Anything but pure. 

So this is a good thing, overall, though the process of change can be irksome, and exhausting.  New English words are created, often pilfered from others, in such profusion you feel like you’re in a swarm of breeding may flies.  Usage is entirely fungible, and no army of authoritarian schoolmarms could ever staunch our various and sundry populations’ creative misuse, mispronunciation, garbled grammar and syntactical sin.

Though change is inevitable, you don’t have to always like it.  A favorite pastime around this household is gritching about popular degradations of proper speech.  That is, proper by our likes, but in the future these preferences will be considered archaic.  Using the noun “impact” as a verb has achieved such widespread acceptance it’s a fait accompli.  That written, to me the only correct use of impacted relates to wisdom teeth, or when Carl Sagan described a giant asteroid slamming into the side of Jupiter.

But I console myself from such fretting by thinking of language as perfectly mirroring natural history.  Both evolve relentlessly, in the same fashion.  Species arise, dominate, splinter into sub-species, some wither away, others become entirely distinct.  It’s fair to bemoan the loss of a particular dialect, or even an entire language, but realize that thousands have arisen and died off over the eons, and any field left fallow will soon be bursting with new life.  Most of New England was once farmland.  Now you can barely see the forests for all the trees.

The natural historian Stephen Jay Gould defined a phenomenon he called “punctuated equilibrium”.  This describes how a portion of a certain population becomes isolated from the main herd (which could have been in a stable state for thousands of years), and then very quickly, evolves into something notably different.  Language does exactly the same thing. 

Everyone thinks American English is a corrupted, devolved version of the genteel speech we hear on Downton Abbey.  In fact, during the Revolutionary War the British sounded pretty much like Americans do today.  We’re the ones who’ve stayed the locutionary course while the Brits have moved on.  No one had a Southern accent as defined today until sometime after the Civil War.  The South was, and still is, bursting with distinctive dialects and styles of expression, but only the flattening of mass media could bestow upon us a fully regional inflection.

There used to be an American accent called Mid-Atlantic, sort of a hybrid British/American contraption.  The most useful exemplars were FDR and William F. Buckley, though it was so common in old movies – think Katherine Hepburn or Errol Flynn (an Australian, for Pete’s sake) – that few realized Cary Grant was actually an Englishman.  Since this manner of speaking signaled a kind of aristocratic superiority, we’re well rid of it.  Meanwhile, millions of Americans were quite eager to put Bernie Sanders in the White House, and while the majority rejected his politics, no one thought his Brooklyn accent was a disqualifier. 

Disparaging how other people speak is snobbish at best, 

and at worst, bigoted, since there is no rational or scientific justification for ascribing character flaws to styles of speech.  As with any social construct, accent discrimination is used by those with the upper hand to bludgeon others they’d prefer remain in their disfavored social class. Luckily, our language itself has a way of slipping out from under these predations, dissolving advantages and disadvantages alike. 

And churning out new words like Twinkies at a Hostess factory.

Merriam-Webster added 690 new words to the dictionary last year.  And that doesn’t include thousands more candidates.  James Joyce made up seventeen words, though only “quark” survives to this day, and only because Murray Gell-Mann used it to name a subatomic particle.  Shakespeare, on the other hand, invented over 1,700 English words, most of which are still in use. 

I’m pretty sure I invented the word “rictify”, which I used to describe what happens to some people whose attitudes and beliefs become rigid and fixed in place as they age, suggesting some sort of combination of “petrify” and “rigor mortis”.  A psychologist friend of mine liked it so much, he started using it in his practice.  Haven’t seen it in the dictionary yet, but keeping an eye out. 

Your turn.   

It Seems There Was This Irish Policeman...

 Foil Arms and Hog are three very funny Irish sketch comedians.  They have dozens of videos available on the web but the first one I spotted happens to relate to our favorite genre.  Enjoy.

Toby or not Toby...

If you thought we were finished with weird English, I'm back with an even more… erm… entertaining take. You can blame the usual suspects, ABA and Sharon, who pass on interesting articles.

Aaron Alon is a musicologist, composer, song writer, script writer, director, filmmaker, professor, and humorist. Shortly before the coronavirus pandemic, he assembled a video about making English consistent, a huge task. This is the result.

 

 

 

 

© respective copyright holder

 

I particularly like the Hamlet reading, don't you? But wait, there's more.  Alon wasn't done.

Following comments and critiques, he came up with a supplemental video in which he, well, sings a classic. Here you go.

 

 

 

 

© respective copyright holder

 

What did you think? Aaron said he might consider a video about making constants consistent. I'm still figure out, "I tot I taw a puddy-tat."

Okay, I promise no more weird English slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. For at least a week.

Writing is thinking.

 My wife said to me around the time we first met, “Writing is thinking.”  That’s an excellent notion, I thought at the time, though I didn’t write it down.  I could argue, and I shall for the purpose of this discussion, that much of writing begins with feelings.  These are forms of thought without language.  They are randomly firing neurons, unclarified emotions, mood swings, inchoate brain scramble, that compel one to make sense of it all if you’re so inclined.

And if you are, you may sit down and try to turn these inarticulate surges inside the mind into words on the page.  You may ask yourself, what am I thinking, presuming that those feelings are indeed embryonic thoughts?   But if it goes well, you can begin to stumble around trying to apply words to these impulses, leading to sentences, then paragraphs, then pages and chapters, etc. 

With luck and effort, something akin to discourse, or fiction, will emerge. 

There are theories of quantum mechanics that maintain that the properties of sub-atomic particles only behave in an orderly, predictable way when observed.  That the observer enforces a certain type of logic and reason upon the physical world.  

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/02/980227055013.htm  

Could it be that the act of observing ones feelings brings order to otherwise incoherent urges, which then, upon the application of language, reveal their inner nature?

Beats me, but it’s nice to think so. 

Every writer reports there are times when the writing seems to be writing itself, that the person behind the keyboard is merely the delivery system, with no agency over the outcome.  If you believe that feelings are proto thoughts, then perhaps the act of assembling words into sentences actually organizes the chaos into coherence.  Some believe this process of constructing intelligible meaning out of the mental agitator inside our minds is what separates us from animals, even smart ones.  (I’m not so sure, having a terrier who knows the difference between  “Want to go for a ride?” and “Go get your toy!”) 

Another mystery of composition is when a writer discovers something about their story in the process of the writing.  Something they never thought of suddenly appears on the page, and it makes sense, often solving a hitch in the works.  My wife once asked me why I was so feverishly writing the end of a book, and I told her, “I want to know how this thing turns out.”

The number of possible connections between brain cells is so staggeringly immense, it’s not surprising that revelation can seemingly pop out of the blue.  It used to be called divine intervention, back when divinity played a more active role in our understanding of the universe.  

Today, brain science would assert that it’s merely the interaction between the subconscious and conscious mind that allows for this reordering of feelings and impressions into serviceable language.  Not a very romantic notion, I admit.  Divine intervention, or the spark of spontaneous genius seems much more satisfying, less clinical, more fun.  But I think the likely result of our churning, surprising mental functions to be exciting enough.  To my mind, science is a lot more awe inspiring than any mythological narrative could ever be.

I’m a fine woodworker, and much of the process involves beginning with an imagined object. 

From there, you try to render it in two-dimensional space, with a drawing (I still use a pencil, architectural scale ruler and graph paper).  It’s the first proof-of-concept.  If you can’t draw it, you can’t build it.  The next step is usually a prototype – a physical, 3D rendering of the drawing.  As the process progresses, you move gradually from the abstract to the concrete, something you can hold and measure in actual space and time.  If the prototype works, you’re good to go.  Next step is bringing the actual thing to fruition. 

I believe that writing is exactly the same process.  That’s why, to me, a house is a novel.  Kitchen cabinets a book of short stories.  A turned spindle a poem. 

By the way, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle could throw a pretty big wrench in the above assumptions, but that’ll have to wait for another essay. 

 

 

Attempted Language

  I have been thinking lately about the weird ways the English language deals with certain incomplete actions.  The weirdest part is that all of the examples I come up with are about bad things.  Let me give you eight-ish examples.

1. This particular flea jumped into me ear because I hear people talking about the events of January 6th as a coup. For this column I am not interested in discussing politics but language.  Surely if that's what it was, it was an attempted coup, right?  Because it didn't succeed.

2.  And then there is what the Russians are doing in Ukraine.  I have seen it referred to as genocide.  Well, the dictionary says that that is killing a lot of people in the hope of destroying a nation or ethnic group.  But if that's what's going on we would have to call it attempted genocide, because (hooray!) they don't seem to be succeeding.

3. On a more personal basis, let's say I tried to punch you on the nose and missed.  (I'd be glad I did, because I really do like you.)  In some states I would be guilty of attempted assault.  In others the charge would be actual assault.  If I had connected with your schnoz (sorry!) it would be assault and battery.

4. And then there is mutiny.  My knowledge of that offense is based strictly on fiction, mostly the movie based on Herman Wouk's famous novel. But I was under the impression that even discussing mutiny amounted to mutiny.  So is there such a thing as attempted mutiny?

I asked two people likely to know more than me.  Mystery writer James Lincoln Warren served in the Navy and his wife Margaret Warren was actually a Navy attorney.  They point out that charges of mutiny are extremely rare; simply "disobeying orders" is the more likely offense. But Margaret notes that the Uniform Code of Military Justice does recognize the existence of "attempted mutiny." So Fred MacMurray in The Caine Mutiny has been dethroned as my source of legal wisdom. Much thanks to Margaret and James.

5. I think for many years people tended to confuse impeach with "remove from office." Thanks to a certain politician we have become aware in recent years that it only means indict, not convict.

6. What is the difference between "I tried to warn you" and "I warned you?"  Unless the email doesn't get delivered, isn't the result the same?

7. Another  sign of our interesting times: I have heard people talk about conspiracy when contextually they obviously mean conspiracy theory.  

8. Slightly different issue...  If you take the sentence "He was tempted to do it" and change it to "He was tempted to do it by the devil," the word tempted shifts its meaning.

9. Slightly MORE off-topic.  Somebody should use the ambiguity of "had" in a mystery story.  Agatha Christie could have built a novel on it, and for all I know she did.  Here's what I mean: "John had his house robbed" probably means "Somebody robbed John's house," but it could mean "John arranged for someone to rob his house."  The cad.  

And that's all I've got.  I hope it entertained you, if not, I at least, uh, tried.

Shelf Life

There was a recent piece in the local paper about a homeless guy who was a crime victim, and the New Mexican referred to him as “unhoused,” which I’m assuming is a new locution.  Mind you, this is a guy my dad would have called a bum, plain and simple. We should take a look at some context.  There was a policy adopted a few years back – a few being relative, it might have been during the Reagan administration – to de-institutionalize the homeless.  Whatever guiding principle was involved, the proximate result was to dump a lot of people on the street who didn’t have survival skills.  What they had were serious drug and alcohol addictions, and unresolved mental health issues.  The problem hasn’t been much alleviated by successive social policies, and it doesn’t matter whether you change the descriptives to somehow humanize these people at the bottom of the food chain.  They’re still in bad shape, just the same.

I realize the anti-woke crowd would suggest that we’re getting overly sensitive to hurting people’s feelings, but it’s not about hurt feelings.  That’s to willfully misunderstand the framing of the argument.  Language is as much about the people applying the labels as it is about the people being labeled, if not more.  Spazz and ree-tard were in vogue back when we were in grade school, and they may still have currency, but if kids use them, they’d probably say they mean no insult to anybody who’s actually spastic or developmentally challenged; it’s exaggeration for effect.  The days are hopefully long past when we threw stones at the witless.  As for words (as opposed to sticks and stones), the same goes for Quentin Tarantino’s favorite noun, or any number of common slang epithets for gay guys or Jews, Italians or Irish or Arabs, and calling somebody a towelhead says more about you than it says about them.

Vocabulary goes in and out of fashion.  We use the term dial tone, but it’s untethered to physical reality, because who dials anymore?  Likewise, a word like Okie, which was specific to homegrown refugees from the Dust Bowl, and these days is as dated as The Grapes of Wrath.  (Except for those pesky refugees, the mojados who just keep coming.)

As a writer, and particularly a writer who’s done his share of period pieces, I’d be the first to admit that colorful language reinforces atmosphere, and authenticity.  Leaving aside the unhappy plethora of prithee, sirrahs in Sir Walter Scott’s medieval fables, he uses picturesque and homely lingo to honest effect in his Border stories, which are closer to his own time.  And for my part, I doubt if the Mickey Counihan stories would have the same gamy flavor if I sanitized the way he talks.  On the other hand, we recognize that even if this is “the way they talk,” common vulgarities perpetuate ugly stereotypes.  It’s not a matter of whether we say these things aloud or in secret.

Language is organic, not prescriptive.  It grows on its own.  The French have an Academy, to hand down the rules, but they can’t keep the weeds out.  I’m no big fan of eviscerating language, of diminishing its muscularity.  Why water your whiskey?  A lot of the time, there’s no real substitute for brute Anglo-Saxon invective.  But there’s a difference between talking dirty, and using language that’s offensive because it singles people out for ridicule, and diminishes them.  It cultivates lazy habits of thought: Jews are grasping, black people are shiftless, Mexicans are illiterate beaners.

We can retire usage, just like clothing.  I might still fit into those paisley bell-bottoms, but hopefully friends and family would stage an intervention.  Sentimental attachment only goes so far.  Enough with the hand-me-downs. 

It Rained All Night the Day I Left

I've been thinking lately about the diminution, or devaluation, of language. Degradation, even, not too strong a word. The calculation being that it doesn't matter, that precision or accuracy is irrelevant, and we're just a bunch of persnickety snobs, who condescend to honest folk and treat them like knuckle-dragging hillbillies, that never had no book-larnin', and get things all twisted around with fancy words and high-falutin' airs.

I'm obviously thinking, too, that this is connected to our present culture of false or competing narratives - conspiracy theories, in effect. Bad money drives out good. The counterfeit devalues honest weight.

There was a time, not that long ago, when a guy like Albert Einstein inspired respect. ("How does it feel to be the smartest man in the world?" somebody asked him. "I don't know," he said. "You should ask Tesla.") An athlete or a war hero, sure, but Jonas Salk and the polio vaccine, the NASA team that put us on the moon, an American novelist winning the Nobel. We admired their skill, and tenacity, and sheer will. We took pride in their intellect. All of a sudden, this is suspect, and we're not supposed to trust the weatherman. Not an exact science, admittedly, but more informed than reading the entrails of chickens.

Maybe this is an odd complaint from a writer of fictions, but to be convincing, fiction depends on exact detail. If you get one thing wrong, it casts doubt on all the rest. Not to mention Twain's enduring advice: use the right word, not its second cousin. 

So if you take this inexactness, and fold it in with false narrative, you get a kind of Stalinist double-talk. "Our brave soldiers are moving ever forward," or "Our fervent comrades of industry are exceeding all expectations," and pay no mind to the NKVD machine guns behind our brave soldiers, to shoot slackers, or the bazillion shoes made to fit left feet. Facts become transactional, in the sense that they're negotiated. We agree on a shared reality, the least common denominator. (Or is that the most?)

The question then becomes, what's lost, in the exchange? As language gets dulled, it conveys less. Misuse makes it less useful. Without precision, it's at the same time less resonant. It slips its moorings, cast adrift.

Now, in France - I know, this sounds like the opening line of a comedy routine, the same crowd that regards Jerry Lewis as an auteur - the French answer to an Academy, which guards against barbarisms, like social media or cell phone jargon imported from les Etats Unis. Good luck with that one. But it reminds me that my grandmother, all these many years back, wrote a letter to R.J. Reynolds, complaining about their advertising slogan, 'Winston Tastes Good, Like a Cigarette Should.' And she actually got a very courteous response. Apparently enough people were offended by the use of 'like,' instead of 'as,' that corporate assigned a team to answer the complaints. The answer, in effect, was that they were dumbing it down. This was advertising, not Freshman English. It simply sounded better to the naked ear. My grandmother was having none of it. A longtime educator, she wasn't in the least mollified. She was fluent in French, too, although to my knowledge she never saw a Jerry Lewis picture. 

English as a language, of course, develops through usage and accretion, much like English common law, established by precedent and convention, not by fiat. There is no ruling body, the Chicago Manual of Style notwithstanding, to lay down the law one way or the other, or settle the dispute over the Oxford comma. But it's disheartening, all the same, to see language disrespected - or more to the point, dismissed. I'm not that much of a grammar Nazi, although I do think spelling counts, and I'm overly fond of the semi-colon, but what distresses me is that the dismissiveness, the act of not caring, seems symptomatic of a larger contempt for expertise, for informed debate. Somebody, maybe from the CDC, commented about the anti-vaxxers, "Science is just another voice in the room." In other words, everybody gets equal time, no matter that common sense calls bullshit. 

I'm well aware that I could be accused of falling into a You-Kids-Get-Off -My-Lawn thing, and that what I'm saying is by definition elitist, but that's the whole damn point. When language loses coherence, when it loses exactness, it loses utility. You can't share an agreed-upon reality if you can't even describe it. Is this political? Of course it is. The politics of language is about ownership. If we surrender ownership, we lose the gift of speech itself.  

Punctured Punctuation

➊ Commencing today, Tribune Publishing (which includes our local Orlando Sentinel) and Hearst Magazines (consisting of Cosmopolitan, Elle, Car & Driver, Redbook, and Woman’s Day) initiate a program of ‘punctuation reduction’, both as a cost reduction measure and a nod toward modernization in recognition of “cell phone exigencies of post-Millennial Generation Z.”

Happy Easter!

➋ In addition, a number of Tronc (Tribune On-line Communications) properties such as The New York Daily News, tabloids and magazines (including a revitalized Newsweek), will begin experimental use of emojis (aka 😀 emoticons) in limited sections of their publications such as editorials, letters to the editor, and personal ads.

Background

Punctuation reduction is nothing new. On the 1^st of December 1896, The New-York Times removed its logo hyphen in a bid toward modernization, thus raising eyebrows among readers. Technically, a newspaper’s stylized heading is called a nameplate. Nameplate should not be confused with masthead, which contains owners’, editors’ and publishers’ names and disclosures.

Again, on the 21^st of February 1967, The Times removed its famed period (fullstop) from its nameplate. Often discussed in business courses, the newspaper gave two justifications. Once again it modernized the famous nameplate, and The Times’ finance department calculated it saved an inordinate gallonage of ink and a corresponding reduction in operating cost.

Hearst and Tribune plan to gradually reduce or even eliminate punctuation in ‘non-ambiguous contexts.’ The reduction will begin with Oxford commas, semicolons, double-quotes, and slowly advance, allowing older readers an opportunity to grow accustomed to the removal of punctuation at the end of paragraphs, much as occurs in present-day cell phone novels. Tribune publications expect to experiment with mid-paragraph sentence termination by using three spaces instead of periods. It is believed spaces combined with a following capitalized word will improve ‘literary flow’ and ‘rapidize comprehension’.

He Said, She Said

As reported a year and a half ago, the San Francisco Examiner, a Hearst publication, moved to add ‘non-binary’ gender pronouns in its reporting.

Historically, colleges have led the charge toward evolving language. The University of Michigan officially supports non-binary gender pronouns comprising such examples as ze, zie, zim, sir, miz, ve, ver, vis, ou, pers, and they (singular). ‘It’ (regarded fondly by fans of The Addams Family), once considered a potential pejorative, is becoming acceptable. (“The driver parked its truck.”)

Meanwhile, the disparaging word ‘woman’ knots the knickers in Mount Holyoke Women’s College:

Outside the US

‘Genderless’ pronouns, limited to the ‘American language’, aren’t expected to impact proper English spoken on other continents. Not so with punctuation reduction and emoticons. One need look no further than James Joyce, notably Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, 3684 words punctuated with two fullstops.

Likewise, Shakespeare himself seldom used periods, as seen in Hamlet’s monologue.

James Murdoch, son of publisher Rupert Murdoch, told the Sunday Times, “Amongst news producers and consumers, News Corp faces an existential crisis of credibility, not limited to The New York Post, The Wall Street Journal, and– especially acute here in Britain– News of the World. Our former MySpace asset demonstrated demographics of age 25 or less attach greater believability to modern, minimalist communication. We’re eyeing emoticons (emojis), sentence simplification and eradication of superfluous punctuation as a means of engaging younger Generation X & Y readers. Within ten years, what remains of the reading public will find punctuation peculiar and outdated.” Murdoch added, “The British public has largely forgotten the NotW perceived misstep, and we may relaunch it on-line through social media.”

What To Expect

Adapting J R R Tolkien’s The Hobbit from cell phone novel to the larger screen results in the following. We’ve taken the liberty of capitalizing proper names.

The Hobbit

Excitable little fellow said Gandalf as they sat down again   Gets funny queer fits but he is one of the best one of the best—as fierce as a dragon in a pinch
If you have ever seen a dragon in a pinch you will realize that this was only poetical exaggeration applied to any hobbit even to Old Tooks greatgranduncle Bullroarer who was so HUGE for a hobbit that he could ride a horse   He charged the ranks of the goblins of Mount Gram in the Battle of the Green Fields and knocked their king Golfimbuls head clean off with a wooden club   it sailed a hundred yards through the air and went down a rabbit-hole and in this way the battle was won and the game of Golf invented at the same moment

Editorials

We can only imagine how an emoji op-ed might appear.

Dear Editor, Sir! I’m irate, nay, outraged. 😤 Your incompetent investigative reporting of pet psychics exemplifies the worst in fake news. ☹️ Medium Sylvia Greene predicted my Eric 🐠 would die and sure enough, within two years it floated belly-up in its bowl. So there!!! 😝
— A Disappointed Reader 😖😡🤬

Agony Columns

Likewise, what might personal advice columns look like?

Dear Prunella, The 😍❤️ darling of my life packed up his family and moved to Alaska. 💔😫 He always dishes out silly excuses: I’m nuts, I’m scary, he’s not attracted, he’s happily married. 😒 Also, I didn’t use a real knife🔪, more like a cleaver. 👿 Would it violate my restraining order if I snip off my ankle bracelet and move to Fairbanks? 🤔
— Most Definitely Not a Stalker 😭

Happy holiday, everyone! 🐣🐥

Older Than You Think

"You, hear me! Give this fire to that old man. Pull the black worm off the bark and give it to the mother. And no spitting in the ashes!" - (Explanation later)

The New York Times ran a great article the other day called, "Many Animals Can Count, Some Better Than You".  I am sure that every one of us who has /had a pet can assure them of that.  (Try to gyp a dog out of the correct number of treats.)  Not only can they count - as a female frog literally counts the number of mating clucks of the male - but they can compare numbers.  (Read about the guppies and the sticklebacks.)

But where the article really got interesting was where they talked about that, despite math phobia, etc., humans have an innate "number sense." There is archaeological evidence suggesting that humans have been counting for at least 50,000 years.  Before writing ever came around, people were using other ways of tallying numbers, from carving notches (bones, wood, stones) to clay tokens that lie all over Sumerian sites and which often looked, for decades, to archaeologists like bits of clay trash.

But the ability to count and the desire to count and to keep track comes before tokens or notches, otherwise they'd never have bothered.  And language - blessed language - comes before all of that.  So get this:  they say that the number words for small quantities — less than five — are not only strikingly similar across virtually every language in the world, but also are older (and more similar) than the words for mother, father, and body parts.  Except certain words like... no, not that!  (Get your mind out of the gutter)  Except the words for the eye and the tongue. Make of that what you will...

Dr Mark Pagel, biologist at Reading University, said, “It’s not out of the question that you could have been wandering around 15,000 years ago and encountered a few of the last remaining Neanderthals, pointed to yourself and said, ‘one,’ and pointed to them and said, ‘three,’ and those words, in an odd, coarse way, would have been understood.”  That just gave me goosebumps when I read it.  

Development of Sumerian cunieform writing,
Td k at Wikipedia

I admit, I'm fascinated by the past. (That's why I became a historian...)  To me, history is time travel for pedestrians, a way to connect with our ancient ancestors.  So let's zip around a bit, starting with jokes (Reuters):

Sumerian man,
looking slightly upset...
(Wikipedia)

“Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.” - Sumeria, ca 1900 BC

“How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish.” - Egypt, ca 1600 BC, supposedly about the randy Pharaoh Snofru

The earliest [written] "yo' mamma" joke, from an incomplete Babylonian fragment, ca 1500 BC:
"…your mother is by the one who has intercourse with her. What/who is it?"
(Okay, so it doesn't translate that well, but we all know where it's heading.)

And this riddle from 10th century Britain (for more see here):
"I am a wondrous creature for women in expectation, a service for neighbors. I harm none of the citizens except my slayer alone. My stem is erect, I stand up in bed, hairy somewhere down below. A very comely peasant’s daughter, dares sometimes, proud maiden, that she grips at me, attacks me in my redness, plunders my head, confines me in a stronghold, feels my encounter directly, woman with braided hair. Wet be that eye."
(Answer at the end and no peeking!)

Plot lines go very, very far back as well.  

Ancient Egyptian leather 
sandals (Wikipedia)

The fairy tale with the oldest provenance is "The Smith and the Devil" which goes back at least 7,000 years, and has been mapped out over 35 Indo-European languages, and geographically from India to Scandinavia.  (Curiosity)  The bones of the story are that the Smith makes a deal with the Devil (or death) and cheats him.  Now there's been all sorts of variations on it. In a very old one, the smith gains the power to weld any materials, then uses this power to stick the devil to an immovable object, allowing the smith to renege on the bargain. Over time, the smith's been transformed to clever peasants, wise simpletons, and, of course, fiddlers ("The Devil Went Down to Georgia" is, whether Charlie Daniels knew it or not, a variation on this very, very old fairy tale), and the devil occasionally got transformed to death or even a rich mean relative.  Check out Grimm's "The Peasant and the Devil" and "Why the Sea is Salt".

Enkidu, Gilgamesh's
best friend - his death
sends Gilgamesh in
search of eternal life.
(Urban at French
Wikipedia)

But Cinderella's pretty old, too, and just as universal.  Many people believe that the Eros/Psyche myth is the true original.  The Chinese version, Ye Xian, was written in 850 AD, and has everything including the slipper.  There's a Vietnamese version of ancient lineage, The Story of Tam and Cam.  And there are at least 3 variations of it in 1001 Nights.  (BTW, if you're gonna read 1001 Nights - and I recommend it highly - read the Mardrus and Mathers translation in 4 volumes.  Available in paperback or Kindle at Amazon.)

And, of course, many stock plots go at least as far back as Sumeria, including rival brothers (Cain and Abel), blood brothers (Gilgamesh and Enkidu), old men killing their rivals (Lamech, Genesis 4), the Garden of Eden, the Great Flood (complete with ark, dove, and rainbow), and the quest for eternal life (Gilgamesh).

BTW, most of the stories in Genesis come from the Epic of Gilgamesh, which makes perfect sense when you remember that Abraham is said to have come from Ur of the Chaldees, which was a Sumerian city.  

But back to words, which are, after all, our stock in trade as writers.  Remember above, where I quoted the NYT how you could communicate with Neanderthals by pointing and using number words?  And remember that sentence at the very beginning?  

"You, hear me! Give this fire to that old man. Pull the black worm off the bark and give it to the mother. And no spitting in the ashes!" 

According to researchers, if you went back 15,000 years and said that sentence, slowly, perhaps trying various accents, in almost any language, to almost any hunter-gatherer tribe, anywhere, they'd understand most of it.  You see, the words in that sentence are basic, almost integral to life, constantly used, constantly needed, for over 15,000 years, since the last Ice Age.  (It's only recently that we've lost our interest in black worms except in tequila and mescal.)

Due to the fact that we live on a planet with 7.6 billion humans and counting, it's hard to realize that, back around 15,000, there were at most 15,000,000 humans on the entire planet (and perhaps as few as 1,000,000).  They probably shared a language.  If nothing else, they would have shared a basic trading language so that when they ran into each other, they could communicate. Linguistics says that most words are replaced every few thousand years, with a maximum survival of roughly 9,000 years. But 4 British researchers say they've found 23 words - what they call "ultra-conserved" words - that date all the way back to 13,000 BC.

Speaking of 13,000 BC, here's a Lascaux Cave Painting.  Wikipedia

Now there's a list of 200 words - the Swadesh list(s) - which are the core vocabulary of all languages.  (Check them out here at Wikipedia.)  These 200 words are cognates, words that have the same meaning and a similar sound in different languages:

Father (English), padre (Italian), pere (French), pater (Latin) and pitar (Sanskrit).  

Now this makes sense, because English and Sanskrit are both part of the Indo-European language family.  But our 23 ultra-conserved words are "proto-words" that exist in 4 or more language families, including Inuit-Yupik.  (Thank you, Washington Post.  And, if you want to wade through linguistic science, here's the original paper over at the National Academy of Sciences.)

So, what are they?  What are these ultra-conserved words, 15,000 years old, and a window to a time of hunter-gatherers painting in Lascaux and trying to survive the end of the Younger Dryas (the next-to-the last mini-Ice Age; the last was in 1300-1850 AD)?  Here you go:

thou, I, not, that, we, to give, 

who, this, what, man/male, 

ye, old, mother, to hear, 

hand, fire, to pull, black, 

to flow, bark, ashes, to spit, worm

There's got to be a story there.  How about this?

"I give this fire to flow down the bark!  Who pulls the man from the mother?  Who pulls his hand from the fire?  Who / what / we?"

I was trying a couple of variations on these words, and then I realized that the ultimate has already been done:

"Who are you?" [said] the Worm.  

PS - the answer to the riddle is "onion".  

Couldn't Care Less

A friend of mine was wondering the other day why common expressions get dumbed down, in terms of usage being corrupted. It was because I'd used the phrase 'rhetorical question,' and he wanted to know exactly what that meant. Not that he hadn't heard it before, but how had it come to mean what it's now taken to mean, and were we even using it correctly?

I had to think about it. I decided it originally meant a question intended to spark discussion, a rhetorical device, in other words. Then why, Tony asked me, does it mean a question with an obvious answer, something that goes without saying? In this sense, Tony himself was posing a rhetorical question, something to encourage conversation or deepen our curiosity.

Why does language get less precise? We know English isn't static. It's full of borrowings, and disharmonies, and new constructions. Usage is a moving target. Leave it to the French, naturally, who being French have an Academy to settle these difficulties. The problem being that nobody under the age of four score and ten bothers to pay any attention. Younger people go right on using 'gigabyte,' or whichever neologism or borrowing fits the bill. If everybody else in the world is comfortable with the word, why complain that it lacks authenticity? Orthodoxy is itself suspect. Judgments are arbitrary. Who's being held to which standards?

It's curious, nonetheless, how vocabulary moves into common currency, and loses its specificity. Some of this is a broadening, or dilution, but some of it is almost willful misapprehension. Freudian, for example. Does it mean anything at all, other than being generally dismissive of self-examination, conflating it with self-indulgence? (You can be impatient of narcissism without discarding any and all inner reflection.) Another one is Darwinian. I'm thinking particularly of the expression 'Social Darwinism.' It's taken to mean a barbaric compact, brute force, the weak trampled underfoot, which describes the condition, but Darwinian it ain't. Survival of the fittest had never meant the biggest, baddest predator in the jungle, it's in fact more appropriate for the elusive prey animal who lives to see another day, and breeds for stealth.

Admittedly, we're talking science here, and complicated ideas get the pulp squeezed out. Marxist, there's a good candidate that's turned into a catchall. I think we might be talking about a general carelessness, or simple mistrust of ambiguities and contradictions, a constipation of our mental bowels. Thinking makes your head hurt, let's face it. Labels come easier. But that's almost presupposing a dumb gene, and dumb isn't a survival mechanism. Or what if it is? What if it's a social survival mechanism? Maybe it's about the aggregate comfort zone, not the individual's personal comfort at all. 

Getting into deep waters. Maybe all it is, is laziness. Do we hear a double-negative in 'I Couldn't Care Less,' and lean into the wind? Or is 'I Could Care Less' not a correction of grammar but a contraction, one less syllable, one less hesitation in our thought process, a slip of the tongue? Language is an amalgam, and impure, but all the same, we keep trying for accuracy. The purpose of language, the purpose of words, is to explain ourselves. We can obviously use language to misdirect, to deceive or obscure or conceal - our words may be false, but they still have weight - and does a cracked glass then ring true?

If we lose meaning, if we pretend a thing is what it is not, we're substituting a false equivalency. It all weighs the same. Nope. Look again. Your glass is empty.

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, "it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty," which is to be master - that's all."

Cold War Words, Hot War Words

You may remember that my last piece here was about the importance of empathy as illustrated by two very different books about intelligence work: John Le Carré's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and Nicholas  Rankin's Masters of Deception.  Today I want to go back to those books to discuss a  different topic: language.

Le Carré is renowned for his plotting and characters but it is his use of words that dazzles me the most.  He invented a vocabulary of spying, most of it in Tinker Tailor, which is both memorable and believable.

When TTSS was adapted for TV and appeared on PBS there was a full-page ad, sponsored by Mobil, I believe, promoting the show and explaining the vocabulary.  Clearly someone thought the average viewer would be baffled by the jargon and give up even before they had a chance to be baffled by the plot. 

The most famous example, of course, is mole, for a double agent, especially one who was working for Side A even before he dug his way into the ranks of Side B.  Le Carré says he borrowed it from Russian intelligence circles although it turns out Sir Francis Bacon used it in the 1600s.  Le Carré says he had not read Bacon, and why should we doubt him?.  What is certain is that mole is part of everyday usage now.

Here are a few more of Le Carre's memorable coinings:

The Circus: MI-6 , so nicknamed for its (fictional) location in London at Cambridge Circus, but of course suggesting the chaos that often goes on there.

Lamplighters: The secret communication and dead letter people.

Breakage: People quitting the Circus.

 Scalphunters: The dirty work crowd, killers, kidnappers, etc.

Joe: Any agent in the field.  "I have to meet one of my joes."

Coat-trailing: Trying to convince the other side that you are a likely candidate to work for them. 

Honey trap: An attractive person set to woo a spy with their physical charms.

And so on.

But it isn't just terminology that makes Le Carré's language so vivid.  Let's take a couple of examples from a later book, Smiley's People.  An old Russian wants to tell George Smiley that he has acquired three facts that might be used to destroy their deadly enemy Karla.  But the coded message he gives is "I have three proofs against the Sandman."  Sends a shiver down my spine.

A few pages later Smiley reflects on the fact that a spy in trouble immediately discards the most valuable thing he is carrying.  But here is how that comes out:  "in the spy trade we abandon first what we love the most."  And that brings it to a whole different level, doesn't it?

My favorite of Le Carre's non-Smiley books is A Perfect Spy.  The protagonist of that one, Magnus Pym, is a double agent (this is not a spoiler) and he writes a confession to his son, although he certainly knows that the boy will never be allowed to read it.  Discussing the years just after World War II, he writes, "Vienna was a divided city like Berlin or your father"  For me, that's a real gut-punch.

What about the new le Carre novel, A Legacy of Spies?  It's very good but only two bits of language leapt out for me.  There is a safe house which Smiley named the Stables.  If that strikes you as having a mythological reference, at least one character in the book agrees with you.

And in a flashback we see the old spy's protege Peter Guillam demanding an explanation of the dodgy operation they were involved in.  Smiley tells him some of the story and then asks:

"Do you now have all the information you require?"

"No."

"I envy you."

 

Classic Smiley.

Moving on to Rankin's book about deception in the wars.  I was fascinated to learn that certain important and familiar words came from World War I. (Rankin notes that they did not appear in the famous eleventh edition of Encyclopedia Britannica, which appeared in 1911, but received major attention in the twelfth, after the war.)

Among the new words are propaganda and camouflage.   Also, in the British empire the best shooters were those who could kill small, fast-moving marsh birds called snipes. And, of course, those shooters were called snipers. 

I knew that tank, the word for heavily armored fighting vehicle, came from a bit of World War I deception - they're just spare petrol tanks! - but I had not realized that Ernest Swinton is credited with both the concept and the name.  Swinton was also a writer; his much-imitated Defence of Duffer's Drift turns what could be a pedestrtian lesson in military strategy into a fascinating story. 

And speaking of writers, the Director of Information for Britain during part of the war was John Buchan, author of The Thirty-nine Steps.  Oh, and one more?  During World War II, the assistant to the Head of Naval Intelligence had to be a real extrovert, a glad-hander who could play talent-spotter, make nice between competing agencies, and represent the office to the outside world.  The job went to a fellow named Ian Fleming.  Wonder whatever happened to him?