Choose your words carefully

I have been accused of shooting from the lip & not thinking too deeply about what I say. I've also been accused of hiding salient information in a tightly-packed sentence that covers the full intention if you pore over it word for word. You can't win. Don't try.

However, that's a matter of personality or style.

When it comes to word choice, I like to think I have a reasonable vocabulary & I'm not afraid to use it. If I use a word out of place, without being intentionally ironic, I can often get away with it - & bank on it! - simply because common usage isn't.

There are some words, though, that I simply don't use.

My wife looked down on the dog the other night, who she'd managed to disturb from sleep just by breathing heavily or whatever, & she asked "Why do you look at me like I'm your enemy?"

There's a word I don't use: enemy.

I don't have one. I can't remember having one since I was, say, five, on the basis that I don't live in a cold war drama. As an adult, I don't make enemies. I wouldn't know what to do with one. As a result, no-one can easily become my enemy. I think that's a good thing. You can upset me terribly by forgetting my birthday or suggesting I should seriously consider not playing bagpipes, but that doesn't make you my enemy. That's a temporary state of not as much a friend as I'd hoped.

A word that popped up from social media popularity is 'frenemy', meaning someone you superficially treat as a friend, yet act towards as an enemy (usually behind their backs). As cute as that sounds, it's dumb. It's definitely not clever. The dumbness doesn't come from the juxtaposition, but the idea that you, as a person, need to label someone in your network of acquaintances as someone you'd prefer you didn't know. You even have the modern option to 'unfriend' that person, which doesn't make them your enemy, simply not your friend.

Once you label someone as an enemy - or a frenemy - there is an implication that you should do something about that state of the relationship. No-one ignores the existence of enemies. Some people obsess over their enemies, fearing attack or else plotting to attack such people. You don't 'let sleeping dogs lie' in that case.

Having an enemy takes effort. Admittedly, many people think I'm essentially lazy, but I'm sure that's not the reason I don't have - or make! - enemies. It's because the word is simply not in my active vocabulary that I prefer to not put in the effort to see someone in such an adversarial light. 

As usual, language gets in the way of describing language. An adversary is simply someone who, at some point in time, has goals which oppose yours - like a football team. They are not the enemy. The two of you share a passion for being present on the field, share a respect for the rules & system of adjudication & enforcement. There is simply an unfortunate alignment of those goals such that actions to your relative advantages oppose. Your gain is their loss.

If you don't see any action as leading towards labelling someone as your enemy - even in jest - then I believe you will have a happier life. You don't have to focus on making only friends, but you can focus on things that bring you joy, as opposed to focusing on bringing despair to someone else. 

There's another word I can do without: despair. I don't like feeling it. I would prefer to never feel it. When I do feel it, I would like very much to stop doing so as quickly as possible. That's probably just me. Is that laziness again? Despair is usually about wallowing, which doesn't sound like it requires much effort. There's a counter-argument. Despair must be a lazy activity, then, which you foist upon your enemy with some effort on your part. 

It certainly sounds like an easier life to skip all of that & let everyone else work out their own level of laziness.

I am now going to be politically incorrect

I have decided that I am allowed to b politically incorrect, but only because of a logic flaw that makes you be politically correct first. Let me explain.

My daughter is in primary school, & amongst the testing she gets subjected to, reminiscent of a bygone age, are spelling, grammar, comprehension, & writing skills. Good, I hear you say, because kids today can't write. Well, here's the thing - they can, but they don't. They've made this decision simply because of the evidence that writing properly gets you nowhere but into trouble. If you write too well, then you will be misinterpreted immediately by those who can't, & no amount of dumbing down will get you to the level of incompetence displayed by the vast majority of the English-speaking world, because there is no entry exam to gain membership.

Kids today deal with a world full of varied English skills - & even different (locally valid) spelling. There are dialects & vocabulary beyond the range of one school's teaching. What happens when you get beyond that school, though? Beyond the formal teaching structure?

How do I explain to my daughter that in the real world, I work with people whose language skills range from bad to abysmal? These are just the ones in my office. I also deal with offices around the globe & customers, none of whom are required to prove they can correspond in English, but are determined to attempt it, because English is the international language of miscommunication, so everyone does it.

I was recently told by my boss that she has to use a dictionary when receiving a message from me. This is someone who, on meeting, you could be forgiven for thinking speaks English quite well, but in reality has atrocious comprehension skills & written skills devoid of any correlation between intention & effect. Her own accent stops her ability to spell, leading to incorrect word use & a high degree of difficulty in my extracting the nugget of information from the dross of 'easy' phrases employed.

This is the real world. This is not the world that children are being prepared for.

Now, in the business world, with anti-discrimination laws associated with hiring, someone without language skills yet still qualified to 'do the work' must be employed. If, however, 'doing the work' includes, in any way, communicating with someone else - colleague or customer - then language skills are the most important qualification of them all. You cannot discriminate based on ethnicity, country of origin, etc, but you can - & indeed, you should - discriminate on the basis of presentation & effectiveness in a role. Someone more 'qualified' technically is useless if they can't use those qualifications simply because they can't communicate.

You can't discriminate based on gender or orientation or age. Here, there is no effect on communication skills - with the possible distinction of a youth dialect, for example. This is the key to my own success, though. As I get older, & it becomes harder for me to multi-task & deal with memory-based or complex problems, my qualifications & experience merely increase (albeit more slowly). My ability to deal with people who can't communicate decreases - call it tolerance if you like. I am allowed to be intolerant, because it's a proven result of aging, & we've said that you can't discriminate based on age, so my intolerance has to be tolerated. Not yours - mine.

Therefore, for you to be politically correct, you have to allow me to be politically incorrect simply because I am getting old & doing otherwise is just too hard for me.

Drafted

Writing is a process. We go through a series of drafts, & then publish.

Well, that's the way that the industry works - has worked for centuries - so we must do the same thing when we write a blog post, right? Who are you kidding? Draft? An old version? An historical copy of the full state of the document, which is then marked up with changes to be made in the next round of writing? No. Not happening. If I've made a spelling error, I really don't need that on the record, I'm going to just fix it & move on (assuming it isn't done for me automatically). I don't need interim copies, just in case I lose something. In fact, I don't mind losing some parts - whole sentences or paragraphs - because I can very quickly write it all again, without worrying about running out of ink or typewriter ribbon - or in fact needing to cut a new quill.

The process of writing has changed, but we use the same terms to describe the process, in the same way that airline schedules still look like railway schedules, even though we've added several dimensions to the technology & there's no potential for a slower plane to be run into because it makes more stops along the same route. Yes, even that made no sense.

Drafting, though, is a process that is increasingly misunderstood. Once upon a time - not all that long ago, really - writing something long hand (first draft) & then correcting with a different coloured pen would lead to a second draft, simply because the combination of the original & corrected versions (lines or words) wasn't at all clear. Often, it was easier to rip out a paragraph & rewrite it to get a better sense of what was meant all together. You might target a chapter at a time, because collections of loose pages are just unwieldy. You don't do that now. You simply fix what you need to anywhere at any time. You don't go through the laborious process of creating a 'fair copy' (typing from handwritten notes) so that the publisher has half a chance to correct your spelling. You do that in situ. Your first draft should already be effectively a fair copy ... which is unnecessary.

Now you have the opposite problem - you've corrected things as you went, so do you even need to think of another draft? Of course you do, but the best way to get one is to effectively look at what you have & decide how to rewrite it better. The old way forced you to rewrite it. The new way says that you have the words right there in front of you, so you only need to change the bits that don't work. It makes you think that the fair copy of the first draft is so very close to a final version that it just needs a few tweaks - not in terms of grammar, because that's already done, but in terms of ... creativity or inspiration or word choice (grab a thesaurus), or some such that doesn't need another set of eyes to make suggestions, because there's all this automated stuff that can do it for you.

You are, in fact, an idiot.

Draft. This blog post will go from 'draft' (singular) to 'published' (past tense) at the click of a button. It's so easy, so tempting, & it's a struggle to resist that step that makes this real. It's a struggle to not assume that all of the automated things have helped me get to that point, such that I have reached perfection without any enlightenment, & everything, as it stands, will just be

Contemporanus

Don't ever let me be contemporary.

Even the word should have given it away 'con-temporary'. Your words will be temporary & any other option you come up with is just you trying to con yourself. It doesn't seem that long ago I was writing about a classic novel that was slightly out of time when it was published, but was perfect for the time of publication, even if it didn't intend to be - To Kill a Mocking Bird. It became a contemporary classic in a great sunburst of energy that imprinted on everyone's consciousness. It should have been temporary. Times change. Tempo. Now, reading that book without any reference to its time or place of setting, as it was intended, & also no connection to its time of publication, I easily labelled it irrelevant. 

I'm now reading The Grapes of Wrath, & I've quickly gotten the same impression - the post-depression migration of Americans does nothing for me. I have no sense of why it's important even for them, let alone for me. Yes, it's another book that had a big impact when published, & was picked up quickly to turn into a very successful - again, iconic - movie that I've never seen, but that doesn't make it good literature. In fact, I'd almost call it ... bad. There. I did. The language - the attempt to codify the way that ordinary people speak - is also forced in writing, because it's based on sounds & accents that you can't convey. We often have conventions for this that come about over time, but accents aren't fixed for a long period, so you can't rely on the impression lasting, & it's all relative to the author's own experience. The tone of the book, too, doesn't work for me. It makes sense that the author took a workmanlike approach to writing, because that shows & it fits. That simply makes the book, the process, the result, all a direct consequence of the times. Contemporary.

I know the problem from personal experience, though. I wrote some (unpublished) books in my misspent youth, & then went to re-write them, in the hope that my style had matured (heaven help me). The biggest problem is that such a youth was so long ago that computers were a revelation back then. I was sitting there at one of my laptops, writing my book directly into a cloud service while I was visiting my parents, & the subject of the chapter was the enhancement of computer services from three desktops in a cramped room to a converted pair of tutorial rooms where four desktops were networked to a printer. Heady stuff. How do you convey the excitement of such a transformation that would have empowered a whole range of students to do word processing & ... other stuff (who remembers)? My first thought was to 'dumb it down' or shy away from the reality that what I was writing - what I had written - was quite some time ago. Could I try to make it more 'now' - you know, contemporary? Not likely. In fact, the best course of action - which took a lot more writing - was to make it historical instead. That made sense. "I remember when we didn't have computers!" I do. I was a child. Computers were things that filled a whole room in Sci Fi movies in the 1960s - preferably a closed room, if it was a low budget movie.

All of the magic is happening there - inside that room. Don't open the door, because that's where the past is. Stay here, where we don't have to talk about computers or racism or socialism or any of those things that will just just disappear if we wait long enough. Let's be in the now, without necessarily claiming to be contemporary.

Total Misrepresentation

 I love Netflix. It allows me to binge trash night after night, rather than think for myself.

I do try to pepper my viewing with 'alternative' shows & 'unknown' productions to widen my perspective or laugh at a different level, but I often watch a series right through, for example, committing to four seasons of something I would have stopped watching after the pilot back in the old days of free-to-air TV.

I also have a habit of sitting in front of the TV with 'alternative entertainment', just in case. This will be my trusty tablet (& my reading glasses), so that I can play mindless games to alleviate the mindlessness of the TV. When I start watching something (even a movie), I like to look into the production of the thing & play 'spot the Aussie' (there is almost always one in the cast), or else find the real locations used. This usually leaves me with some disappointment that there's a man in his 60s in desperate need of a stunt double to do any action scenes - like running a few metres or taking a flight of stairs. This would make some sense if the actor in question is a 'name' extending their career beyond their physical capability, but it's often a 'nobody' getting their big break by being a 'face' whose portfolio has floated around LA for 30 years. Of course, the man in his 60s is playing a character in his 40s, but he got the role because he could act better than anyone younger.

Watching all of these shows, & then knowing that someone is much older than the person they're portraying, or does not have the cultural background because they arrived in LA - in the US! - only the year before, gives you an entirely different slant on the 'quality' of the experience. It's as if the production didn't care enough to think it through, or else is treating the audience like morons. I don't like being treated like a moron. Listen to me - I binge-watch Netflix. I have cultured tastes. I did, once. I doubt that I have any taste left at all, now. I have eaten too much blancmange to appreciate an added twist of lemon rind or raspberry puree.

I can't blame Netflix. It was all happening a long time ago, when LA became just too expensive for a show to be based, so a lot of shows & movies came out of Vancouver, purporting to be based in the North-West of the USA. As long as the extras were careful with their dialect, everything was fine - the lead actors had all worked in the US for years, so they had the accent down pat. To me, so far away, Canadians are just Americans with a conscience. What would I know?

What used to get up my nose was the use of 'diversity' to populate shows. This is all well & good for representing 'now', because I am very used to every corner of the globe being represented in my local shopping centre. My community is that real, so my TV shows should be. However, anything historical becomes quite jarring. Why is Queen Charlotte so brown? She was German. Who is that sub-continental man supposed to represent? Indians hadn't even been invented in King Arthur's time. 

Ah, but it gets worse again! I was watching the dramatisation of a book where the main character apologised for looking a particular way, ethnically, as if explaining the deviation to the fourth wall. I decided to read the book. It made no mention of the character's ethnicity relative to other characters. In fact, further books in the series almost imply that the chosen actress was perfect for the role, from the point of view of how she looked ethnically. Please withdraw your apology. You have every right to that role, even if you are a year or two older than the book says.

For me, if I have some awareness of a book being 'from a period or in a place', then I have in my head certain expectations of uniform ethnicity, unless the opposite is a strong theme in the book itself. If we're talking about Regency London, then I expect all aristocrats to be Caucasian. Anything else is to be remarked upon as out of the norm & also treated as a curiosity by the close-minded English of the time. Even if the author has never been to England, if they convey that expectation of normalcy, then surely it should be followed up with the visuals. If an author represents one continent of their fantasy novels as being dominated almost exclusively by one ethnic group, then it makes sense that the dramatisation would also be exactly that. If you don't like that, then you won't like the book. If the whole point of the dramatisation was to attract the fans of the book, then surely you would be expected to follow it as closely as possible. You wouldn't use a normal-statured person to 'represent' a dwarf any more than you would employ an African to represent someone of pale skin & naturally silver hair.

Long ago, there was a movement of reactionists who would chant that things were 'too PC' sometimes, when certain phrases should be avoided on TV. Now, we simply avoid them out of habit, because it's just polite & inoffensive to avoid such words & no-one has the 'right' to call someone ... anything, really. In the same way, representation is probably something we still need to be made aware of, be conscious of, in the day to day, because society still just doesn't get it. Society still struggles to elect enough women to parliament, let alone non-Caucasian representatives. We think of these 'aspects' of society as 'minorities' (diminishing to single lesbian rural Vietnamese women in wheelchairs with dependents), which is laughable, because that would mean that the Caucasian male population of Australia, which has to be less than a third, & of which I am a fully-paid-up member, has successfully introduced gerrymandering.

I am not advocating diversity. I am only advocating representation of the truth. Once we accept the truth, then all of this nonsense just becomes normal & not worth commenting on.

To Kill a Cultural Icon

 I didn't like To Kill a Mockingbird.

I read it only recently, usually avoiding 'that kind of book' because I thought it was both 'too modern' & 'not of my culture', without having the vaguest notion of what it was about. I've never seen the movie. I'm vaguely aware that Gregory Peck has a powerful scene in it. I had no idea how that famous scene related to the book, so it was definitely time to find out for myself, not knowing anyone who'd read it, & being vaguely aware that the author's only other book was published posthumously.

Very quickly, I formed a dislike for the book in the way it portrays a young child (of about five) with big ideas explaining their philosophy & incidental schooling in a US backwater around the time of the Depression. It tried to be Tom Sawyer, but failed miserably for being too highbrow & hokey at the same time, without the subtlety or innocence of Clements. I kept wondering where it was going, as a book, & what the fuss was about, as a legacy.

I mentioned that I was reading it & disliked it to a colleague, who said that she'd loved it. Because I hadn't finished, maybe it did have a powerful ending ... but it had a lot to make up for. Then it twigged - in what language did she read it? I was reading an untranslated version. Sure enough, she'd read it in Farsi. She'd looked into the process, & had been assured that the book she read was considered the best translation. The problem is, the dialect of the original would have to be translated into English first. I could understand it as it was, but I'm not sure that 'yessum' conveys the right tone when translated into Farsi. 

I've had this problem before. I told another friend I was reading A Hundred Years of Solitude, & she was in raptures over the imagery of one particular passage that I had quite missed. I had read it in English. She had read it in Farsi (coincidence), & the original was in Spanish. Now, we could both be getting it wrong. In this case, it was a noble-prize-winning author that could well have been butchered in multiple languages.

But let's get back to the book at hand. Mockingbird was a bestseller, & the movie was a box-office hit. Americans (if only them) have been reading the book compulsorily since the 1950s. That's the key. It was a book of its time. It was a book that spoke to a movement to recognise (finally) African Americans as no different to any other Americans. That is not the point of the book, but it's an observation within it, mostly shown through the naiveté of the heroine, who is often told that she doesn't understand how the world works, or that she's too young to have her opinion matter.

That's the author, because the book is in first person. The author considered her message - if that truly was germane to the book - as no more than an alternative view to what her upbringing provided. It wasn't just about black Americans being treated as second class - below white trash - or children being ignored, but also state-controlled education, vigilante justice, poverty within a small community, the treatment of fringe dwellers, religious intolerance, & a whole raft of social issues put into the mouth of a child who would not normally see any of this (or recognise it), but is more likely to accept prejudice as the norm than to question it. Repeatedly, the heroine reminds us that she was allowed to question her father, even if other kids couldn't.

The book itself does not come under criticism - is rarely critiqued - simply because no-one wants to touch that subject matter: inequality ... no, specifically the treatment of African Americans. It was then & is now a taboo subject - criticising books that justifiably criticise an historical society. White Americans never treated black Americans with such contempt. How could they possibly have done? But they did, & only a denialist can shout 'fake news' at that without crossing their fingers. The book is a representation of history, for being strictly fiction, & it is ugly rather than being inspiring, because no-one gets a happy ending. This is rather reminiscent of the work of Harper Lee's chief supporter, Truman Capote. I wonder if, if it wasn't for him, the book would ever have been published, or at least published in time. It was timely, but if it had missed its moment in history, it would not have been missed by the passage of time.

 It doesn't matter what language you translate it into, the book's moment has now passed. It is not timeless in itself. It reflects a period in that country's history that was shameful (a long period from the freeing of slaves to the recognition of equality) & should now be considered almost laughable (how could they think that back then?). If you are moved by such a book, then you are yourself living in the Southern states of the USA in the 1950s, because there is no modern revelation to be had from it.

As an afterthought, any counter-argument that suggests that the book is still relevant because there is still prejudice, not just in the Southern states of the USA, but across the world, should take into consideration that the 70 years since its publication should be considered sufficient time for it to 'work its magic'. The world is full of prejudice, but nothing so insular can change that, because the work can be happily pigeonholed in a time & place that no longer exist.

An 'Aha' moment

English is a terrible language to express in writing (he says, doing just that). Perhaps it's the choice of alphabet, which was never meant for English (which isn't even a Romance language, & we've dropped all of the Anglo-Saxon letters), or the fact that English just isn't anywhere near its roots, being about a third foreign by definition, or simply that, over time, we've tried to use writing (as a concept) for things it was never intended for.

Once, writing was done by professionals. The intended audience were the elite - those who could read. Now, everyone over the age of about three in the developed world (at least) could have a fair crack at writing their own name. 200 years ago, a fair percentage of the population couldn't do that. Not only are we using writing to do more things (like writing our own name & putting that down in a permanent state of spelling), but more people are doing it. Almost all adults in the developed world (I don't know how better to express the idea of places where there is a regulated education system) reads & writes daily. Social media has made it worse, because we're all obsessed with reading & writing opinions. That doesn't make us better at reading or writing, but it does make us all think we can do it, & attitude is everything.

We're far more likely now to write what we say. By that, I don't just mean speech bubbles as thought bubbles, but I mean, quite literally, inserting pauses & mumbling & contractions & incorrect word choices & bad grammar. That's making it real. Again, it doesn't make us better at writing, but it does give the writing attitude.

When I was in school (yes, don't ask how long ago), it was drilled into us to avoid contractions unless we were representing actual speech (or giving birth, which was also to be avoided as a teenager). Heaven forbid that you should actually write in Strine! For the uninitiated, Strine is the Australian dialect, where we proudly have a plural for 'you', being 'youse', which is pronounced like a herd of sheep. Sorry, no, it's pronounced in the same way that you pronounce 'ewes', which is a herd of sheep. This is not a load of bull.

It's about now that I get to my point - well, I'm getting closer. If you're writing all of these speech-oriented interjections & such, then you're going to have to somehow indicate ... well, attitude. There's no other way to describe it. Sure, you could write 'he said with a small voice' or 'she shouted', but you're kind of ruining the flow of the conversation if you're trying to represent two people freestyling & they're using their voices like musical instruments, producing a whole range of emotions & feelings in their choice of word, their volume, their pace, their ... yes, attitude.

English is so limited in giving you the capability to do this within the quotes!

A Norwegian friend of mine was telling a joke, in German, & then complained that you can't explain it in English because the joke's punchline was all about the pronunciation & tone, & English is atonal, to which I responded "Oh really?" & he didn't get it.

Neither can you! Did I use a rising or falling inflexion? A rising inflexion would have been a polite query, & a falling one would have been sarcasm or skepticism. How do you differentiate those without tone? How do you differentiate those in print? I'm sure that someone has come up with a system. I should have looked it up before I started writing this post, but I had all of the stuff I wanted to say in my head & I just had to voice my opinion without thinking too hard about my purpose or my audience, & just writing exactly as I would argue it if I spoke to you in person.

The real 'Aha' moment - by which, I actually mean 'Eureka!' without the bathtub - came when I tried to write each of 

• 'Aha' = I understand you
• 'Aha' = I'm still listening (I'm not asleep)
• 'Aha' = I agree
• 'Aha' = I disagree
• 'Aha!' = Eureka (not the stockade)

All of these come down to where you accent the word, rising or falling end, & vowel length, with possibly more context like how long a pause before you say it. Don't get me started on pauses in print. You can pause by ellipsis, or you can pause by cutting things into sentence segments, or you can pause by expressly saying "then she paused".

But  I guess that's where I should.