Who Needs English?

If I could only have one thing to piss me off about linguistic change, it would be that foisted upon us by business in the hopes of making another nickel a year. Target and Chik-Fil-A don't have customers any more, they have "guests" who they continue to treat as customers. My local public transit agency no longer has passengers; it, too, has customers, whom nobody in the agency treats as customers because, transportation conditions in the area being what they are, there will always be customer/passengers. So the agency (and, importantly, its employees) has no incentive to be anything but autocratic.

In the same vein is the "free gift" offer. I don't know for sure but I imagine there were unscrupulous assholes who offered gifts and then charged for them with the excuse that "free" was never stipulated. Never mind that it's inherent in the concept of "gift"; this is the world of business we're talking about, and only egregious misconduct is permitted to interfere with profit-making.

So of course this should be no surprise whatsoever. If a "gift" need not be free, why should a "free" item be, either?

Orwell had it wrong. Doublespeak won't be the creation of government. (Lord knows government engages in it with abandon, but it's also pretty transparent because it's expected.)

The Waiting Game Sucks; Let's Play "Hungry Hungry Hippos"!

This evening I played a board game (Balderdash if you care). One of the benefits of the commercial game is supposed to be that the words were selected for their obscurity. There are even provisions in the rules for when more than one player knows a word's meaning. I've taken this to mean that there oughtn't be many words I know. And except for one word in a game twelve years ago, this has been so.

Until this evening. This evening, in two games, five words came up that were well-known among us:

· topiary

· sebum

· proboscis

· mickle

· spelunker

Since the words are supposed to be obscure, it seems like five in two games is more than there should have been. And I wonder if it's because of words being better known now than 17 years ago when I got the game, because the makers' criteria for obscurity were looser than they should have been, because my friends are unusually well-read, or because the makers felt like throwing in some easier ones for the sake of I don't know what (it doesn't do a lot for game play when many people know the definition).

Still, vastly more words were unfamiliar, and plenty of proposed definitions were marvellously hilarious.

Things That Make You Go "Aughh"

In the Washington Post today:

"...in Pakistan, where patriotism is equated with support for the military...". Written, without irony, in the newspaper of the capital city of the U.S.A.

"In an even more welcome feat, he manages to de-mythologize Hawaii and bring it into new post-Obama, Pacific Rim-era relevance." The second half of that sentence sounds informed and erudite, but I have no idea what it might mean. What, in 2011, is "post-Obama"? If it's only now that Hawaii has acquired "Pacific Rim-era relevance", what geopolitical space has it been occupying since 1940? And anyway, why does a change in a movie reviewer's attitude toward Hawaii carry geopolitical significance? On 11 Sept. 2001 the scales that blinded Americans to certain geopolitcal realities fell from our eyes—the World itself did not suddenly change. (From a review of the movie The Descendants.)

I've been losing respect for Chris Elliott the travel writer for a couple of months now; it took a big hit from this column: "One incident of planes stranded on tarmac doesn’t justify new laws". Which would be true, except that it isn't "one incident." The new laws were enacted, as laws generally are, in response to something: the continuing occurrence of such low-intensity events. To imply otherwise (when he very much knows better) is disgraceful. Then, to use as his one example a severe-weather-related event that involved multiple aircraft, airlines, and even the entire airport—a wholly atypical situation with respect to the tarmac law? Please.

In Case You Can't Tell, I'm Being Sarcastic

Haven't been posting because (1) I'm tired of the snark and the attitude (including and perhaps especially my own) bred by blogging and its ilk such as newspaper columns, and (B) I haven't had the energy for the thoughtful commentary for which snark and, rarely, wit is so often substituted.

So here's an experimental alternative style.

Post about Unethical Corporations: 5 companies that will destroy civilization. An interesting-enough hyperbole.

#1 (Artifical Disaster) is a company that does a lot of fracking. Fracking can and does cause seismic movement. "The largest 'Cuadrilla quake' measured 2.3 on the Richter scale. Japan's devastating Tohoku quake last April rocked the scale at 9.0 – about 67 times the amplitude." It is true that  9.0 - 2.3 = 6.7, and that 67 = 6.7 x 10. So I understand the mechanics of author Ross Bonander's determination of the number 67, and the arithmetic is computationally correct, but it is based on incorrect assumptions. Seismographic amplitude is indeed measured linearly so seismogram with a peak amplitude of 9.0 has 9.0 / 2.3 = 3.9 times the amplitude of one peaking at 2.3, not 67 or even 6.7.

But it takes energy to move the pen, and although amplitude is measured linearly, the energy it represents is logarithmic: it takes increasing energy-per-unit-amplitude to move the pen further, wherever the pen is. So each whole-number increase in amplitude represents a 30-fold increase in energy. Thus, a mag. 9.0 earthquake is 7.9 billion times more energetic than a mag. 2.3 earthquake ( 30 ^ 6.7 = 7.883 billion and change).

The thing is, "67 times" makes his argument seem plausible in a way that '7.9 billion times' wouldn't. He wrote, "...if the company is careless enough to set off 50 small ones, might it be careless enough to go even bigger next time?" 2.3; 50 of them; 9.0 is 67 times larger: there are only two orders of magnitude difference in the absolute value of those four numbers; the conceptual distance between them is not great, and it makes widespread devastation appear to be within the reasonable scope of a company that has, so far, caused earthquakes that show up on seismographs but are not generally felt. And, heck, I'll even go with his statement on its face, that fracking might cause a quake with a magnitude greater than 2.3.

Not 9.0, though. Not now, not ever. It takes nukes to get into mag. 5.0 territory; the largest conventional explosion ever was mag. 4.4 max, and the Nevada rocket-fuel factory explosion was mag. 3.5. Damage prediction for mag. 4 quakes is "Noticeable shaking of indoor items, rattling noises. Significant damage unlikely". And fracking doesn't even use explosives anyway. It does have the potential for significant environmental degradation, but it's not going to bring our cities tumbling down on our heads.

I started this post with only #4 in mind (I was just skimming the article to see who the 5 unethical companies are) and just happened to notice that #1's error was too egregious to ignore, and it took so long to write the above that I'm skipping #2, 3, & 5.

#4 (Artificial Evolution) is a dam-building company. There are two problems with this part of the article: the premiss and the example. The premiss, that artificial evolution is going to help destroy civilization, is not inherently true. It is how we got corn, rice, dogs, and livestock. And the example, a dam-building company, is plausible but not as used in the article. As far as I can tell, the criticism is that the company has destroyed lots of pleasant and useful places by flooding them. Fair enough; but that is not evolution. At all. Then, only a small fraction of the world is even susceptible to flooding by dams. And of course dam builders don't go around building dams on their own; they do it upon request by elements of civilization.

Curiously, #2 (Artificial Selection) is a better example of what "Artificial Evolution" should mean (I have no idea what Mr. Bonander thinks it means) and of a company that could bring down civilization thereby: but it was already used as #2.

So, anyway, most of what I've read of the article is scary-sounding but wrong. Then I noticed the category the article was put into.

That's Lazy Talk!

I have a tendency towards pedantry. It seems to me that many neologisms or novel uses of existing words are indicative of laziness (it's one thing not to know a suitable word or usage already exists, but another not to bother finding out). I do it too, sometimes wittingly, sometimes not. Just yesterday I realized, while using it, that the verb "to result" is one I would have despised all along had I seen its emergence. It's on my list now.

Also yesterday two phrases came to annoy me enough to merit listing: "to go too far" and "to cross a line". I don't think these indicate the kind of ignorance-laziness I just described, though; I think they indicate a worse laziness, a laziness of thought. They express no more than a vague dissatisfaction that, because it is vague, does not get critically examined. Being slightly more specific than just opining "it is wrong" by suggesting that the problem is one of extent rather than essence, the phrases imply that critical thought actually has been given when in fact it has not: what the phrases mean is "I don't like the application of whatever to this case but I can't tell you why."

What constitutes one's line, and how does it relate to another's? Nobody asks. If we even know what our particular line is (and I doubt we do or we would have said so), we assume it is self-evident. Assumptions about the reason for or extent of dissatisfaction allows a shared experience of dissatisfaction to emerge even when there might be fundamental differences about the reasons for it. The phrases thus make it easy to conflate disparate opinions without realizing it (especially by the news media, bastions of precision and accuracy that they are), with a consequently unwarranted effect on public discourse. Take Wisconsin's union-busting state government: politicians were elected in part on a plank of unions having gone too far, without offering any specifics, and the electorate learned too late that the politicians were more reactionary than itself.

The phrases make me cringe now. I'm going to start asking for clarification when I hear them, and whoever cannot explain themselves more clearly will lose, to my mind, their right to the opinion.