Words, Words, Words

Workmate Henning sent me this video today. It's word-geek and lexicographer Erin McKean pondering the future of "The Dictionary."



It's an amazingly fun talk so you should really watch it, but if you want a brief summary...well, she feels that our concept of "dictionary" is still rooted in a Victorian concept of "appropriate words." This concept started because there simply weren't enough resources to include EVERYTHING in the dictionary. She resents being put into a "traffic cop" role when maintaining a dictionary, and instead looks forward to the day when dictionaries are well-sourced repositories of all available words...not just the words considered dictionary-worthy.

It's a compelling argument and a very current one. Now that we can collaboratively store an essentially unlimited amount of information in forums and wikis all over the world, it makes sense to question whether our information-collection methods are outdated or pointlessly constrained.

But I do find that this discussion tends to overlook something very simple: when people consult a repository of information, what exactly are they looking for? Do they want access to everything, or are they only looking for a subset? And as long as people are looking for a subset we will always require "traffic cops," whether during the information-collection process or during information retrieval.

My objection is that dictionaries are often NOT consulted in order to learn about every word, everywhere, through all times. When I consult a dictionary I simply want to know how to spell a word I already know, and learn the conditions of its use, and perhaps pick up a few synonyms. I need this information because I want to communicate my ideas in as specific and unambiguous a way as possible, especially if I'm writing an essay or -- in my job -- a technical document.

When I consult a dictionary, I am not concerned about interesting regional words or slight differences in spelling ...I want to know what the STANDARD supposedly is for its spelling and usage, so that I can be relatively sure that the reader will understand what I've written...without misunderstanding a word, needing to puzzle over its usage, or having to look it up in the same place I did.

There are obviously places where word standards are less important, sometimes to extreme degrees -- creative writing, emails, texting, blank verse -- but dictionaries do not ONLY serve those situations. Likewise -- to use another one of McKean's examples -- you don't always consult a dictionary because you're just interested in exploring words.

Sometimes you need to know what the STANDARD for the word is. For that you use your style guide, your guide of specific technical terminology...or your dictionary. And for that you also need a "traffic cop."

I think McKean is getting excited about possibilities without stopping to consider the usage. There's certainly a place for a Total Word Repository, but I argue that such a thing is a different concept from the sort of dictionary *I* find useful (except in less formal situations when such a word repository WOULD be useful). I have no problems with viewing language as an organic, ever-changing construct -- that's why we revise dictionaries, after all -- but there are still situations where we require standards within ANY collection as long as it is to be a useful reference -- Wikipedia, a bug list, a technical forum, a book on art history -- and I therefore doubt that a complete, constantly-changing collection of ANYTHING is useful in all (or even most) situations.

Singing Accent

When I was in grade three I noticed that the children around me sang with a subtle British accent. This was strange because none of us had British accents otherwise, but somehow, when we sang in music class, our vowels would warp until we became distinctly...British.

I was probably sensitized to this because I was listening to Pink Floyd's "The Wall" at the time, which contains that "Hey teacher" children's chorus on "Another Brick in the Wall." THOSE kids sounded British too, but they actually WERE British, and I'd somehow picked up on the fact that when WE sang, WE sounded like THEM.

Around this time my father started insisting that us Southern Ontario people didn't HAVE accents; he believed -- and still believes -- that we have become the lowest common denominator of English speech, a mix of all possible accents together until we don't HAVE one anymore. He justifies this by claiming that when people sing they always sound like US, and therefore singing must somehow REMOVE accents, resulting (I suppose) in some sort of pure, undiluted English.

As a child I could never put my objections to this theory into words, but now I suspect that my father was analyzing a certain subset of music, probably bands subsequent to the British Invasion. And it's true, when you listen to bands from England during that period -- Led Zeppelin, say -- many of them DON'T sound British.

But something I realized while listening to my classmates sing was that singing is not something "pure" that releases us from our speech patterns...at the very least it is just another type of affectation. If Julie Andrews could sing in a Cockney accent during "My Fair Lady" even though she wasn't actually British, it's obvious that a British singer could sound North American in exactly the same way...which stands to reason, considering many of those British Invasion bands were emulating American blues and skiffle musicians, and many of them craved acceptance on the Billboard charts.

If you listen to a British band that is NOT trying to be self-consciously American, however, you hear a very thick accent. It might not sound EXACTLY regional -- because, as I said, singing involves affectation and imitation just as much as any other activity does -- but a band like "The Pipettes" certainly doesn't sound like they come from Southern Ontario, that's for sure.

None of this explains why us little Canadian kids sounded British when we sang, however, but I've noticed that it isn't just children who do this...a subset of Canadian artists sound self-consciously British when they sing. Maybe, as kids, we were imitating British new wave bands? Maybe it just seemed like the best way to sing? Or maybe there's some germ of British inflection that comes out when we let our guard down?

"Hothouse" by Brian Aldiss

The sun is going nova and the increase in temperature has rearranged the world's genetic balance. Humans have "devolved" into small, relatively brainless creatures who eke out survival in a small ecological niche. A few species of insects -- the "termights" and wasps -- have grown larger but remain relatively humble beside the immensity of...

...the plants, which dominate the food chain and comprise most of the earth's diversity. Struggling to survive in an increasingly hostile environment, the plants have become vicious predators and are constantly fighting each other. They also like to fight the humans, which is when most of the fun occurs.

This is the basic idea behind Brian Aldiss' "Hothouse," which I read based on two factors:

1. Brian Aldiss was a major booster for Anna Kavan, who I have a medium-grade obsession with. I figured it was time to read one of HIS books.
2. Killer vegetables scare the heck out of me.

I'm not an avid sci-fi reader these days but I USED to be, and my dissatisfaction with the genre is fully represented in this book: it is so in love with its IDEAS that nothing else needs development. Characters and style are chucked aside so that Aldiss can describe The Next New Vegetable Horror, which is always followed by a detailed historical explanation for how the Vegetable Horror came to be...an IMPOSSIBLE explanation, since none of the humans have any way of knowing such details. The book is a slave to its concept, which reminds me of so many sci-fi stories I read as a teenager.

Fortunately Aldiss' concepts are fun, if physically impossible. His vegetable monsters are ingenious, bizarre, and never repetitive, and -- yes -- some of them scare the heck out of me, especially the parasitic Morel.

Most beautiful of his concepts is that of the "traversers," mile-wide vegetable bags who spin webs from earth to the moon. Their webs add a magic touch to the squshy unpleasantness of the dying earth. I say "magic" because the idea is both imagination-stirring and totally wonked. But anyway.

Sometimes Aldiss dispels the books mystery with excessive descriptions of "how and why," but at other times he leaves us totally baffled, and that's when the book excels. At one point, some adventurous humans discover a long-dormant tool from the past, a flying bird-like machine that constantly shouts bizarre slogans ("Boycott chimp goods! Don't allow Monkey Labour in your factory. Support Imbroglio's anti-Tripartite scheme!") This machine achieves absolutely nothing for anybody but the humans enjoy having it around; they call it "Beauty."

Aldiss also writes excessive language for the annoying "tummy-belly men":

"Never before have we seen the stalker-walkers to take a walk with them when they go stalking-walking? Where were they when we never saw them? Terrible herder man and sandwich lady, now you two people without tails find this care to go with them. We don't find the care. We don't mind ever not to see the stalker-walkers stalky-walking."

This quote alone sort of sums up the book: it's a weird, annoying, funny hodge-podge of thoughts all jammed together. "Hothouse" is a mess full of abrupt endings and loose threads, maybe because it was compiled from a series of five novellas that Aldiss had written previously.

Mess or not, "Hothouse" is still fun to read. It is dense and impossible and silly, and I would go so far as to say it's poorly written, but the ideas and the crazy moments keep it going. You don't HAVE to believe that a bunch of mindless vegetable bags have colonized the moon by spitting bubbles of oxygen at it, you just have to be intrigued by the concept, and I am.

Creepy Pedro Episode Seven

I started writing episode seven of "Creepy Pedro" in 2001. I finally finished it this week. If you'd like to read it, go here and click on the last episode. I warn you that it's long, rambling, unpleasant, and not necessarily work-safe, but I think a lot of it is really funny.

Like all of the Creepy Pedro plays I had started it with absolutely no plan whatsoever, but this time I wrote Pedro and his friends into such a conundrum that I couldn't figure out how to get them out...you see, the second half was a parody of the sort of thinking that underlay the gleeful rush into the second Iraq war, and you know how impossible it is to deal with THAT sort of situation.

At least nobody died as a direct consequence of my writing this script.

The episode is called "The Creepy One From the Sky" and it was heavily inspired by the books I was reading at the time: The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever. I figured that Pedro hadn't been dropped into a fantasy setting yet, so it was about time. I was also just discovering George Saunders and I unconsciously ripped off his dialog style in a few places.

If you have the fortitude, enjoy! You don't have to read the previous episodes to understand what's going on. It will all be baffling anyway.

Lois Long Finally Annoys Me

I've said in the past that I enjoy Lois Long's contributions to the 1920's-era New Yorker, particularly her somewhat acerbic "Tables for Two" column (which she wrote under the name "Lipstick"). I've also said that though some scholars have accused her of being a racist, I felt that Long's racial comments were simply par for an authoress writing about Harlem nightclubs, and that I got no impression that Long was -- as charged -- more dismissive of black people than anybody else in the magazine.

Then I ran across her December 22, 1928 review of "Club Harlem."

Above 125th Street, the latest place visited was one called, quite simply, the Club Harlem. Your first impression is of very pleasing decoration--acid yellow walls with huge, foggy, dark-blue silhouettes of barbaric negroes and palm trees. The second impression is of a grand blues orchestra, principally brasses; and the third is of probably the most inferior collection of white people you can see anywhere. Possibly they are hired by the management to give the colored race magnificent dignity by contrast, but I dunno.

I'd have to do some real twisting to make this comment sound innocuous, and taken with the tone of some of her earlier writings I'll finally admit that "they" -- those few scholars who have ever mentioned Lois Long in their research -- are probably right: Long viewed the black people in Harlem as inferior to whites...but cute scenery, and LORD they could dance!

She goes on to mention a "high-yaller chorus," the first time I've heard this term in the magazine.

Neil Shubin Celebrates the Fish

During the past few years American scientists have been bemoaning the lack of accessible science literature, particularly in the field of biology. And they have a right to worry about this.

While biologists and paleontologists are going off and doing important things like researching, teaching, and studying, a group of other people are engaging skilled PR to convince the American public that evolution is somehow a "theory in crisis." Creationists (often camouflaged as "Intelligent Design Theorists") ARE churning out accessible literature about their theories, basically because their theories are so empty that they don't even BOTHER spending time to research them.

I suspect that this was the real motivation behind Neil Shubin's "Your Inner Fish" -- an attempt to quickly get an entertaining layperson's guide to evolution into the marketplace. By quietly revealing the mountain of evidence behind common descent, and by exposing the positively UNDESIGNED aspects of our bodies -- nobody would EVER deliberately build us this way, but it all makes sense if you go back and look at our fish ancestors -- Shubin fires a friendly salvo in a way that anybody can come along and appreciate.

And the book IS lots of fun. He draws on particularly bizarre aspects of our bodies to show why things sometimes go wrong -- hiccups, bed-spins, hemorrhoids -- interspersed with the "human element" of his personal thoughts while dissecting cadavers or searching for transitional fossils. His examples are clear-cut and the illustrations excellent. I've no doubt that this book will fulfill its intent as ammunition for countering the more prevalent creationist propaganda.

But Shubin isn't a fantastic writer, and the book has a hurried quality to it: occasional grammatical and word-usage errors ("jerry-rigged" keeps being used, and others have criticized the books usage of the loaded term "primitive" to describe anything pre-mammal) and often Shubin's prose sounds a bit TOO informal to my ears. Plus, no doubt due to the intended audience of total science newbies, he tends to over-explain the things the rest of us already know, and then gloss over the more technical details that we'd really enjoy reading about. The section on the Bozo family was particularly gaggy.

So basically, "Your Inner Fish" is not intended to be read by anybody who is already -- say -- avidly reading Panda's Thumb and its offshoot blogs, though it does have some interesting new twists and turns, and it CERTAINLY gives a clear (though sort of flippant) description of its subjects. If you'd like a primer on common descent and evidence for evolution, however, this book is certainly for you.

The Scout Shouted About the Mouse in the House

A true story and an honest plea: