Language | Periscope Depth

From the Blog

Oct

check the technique, see if you can follow it

Posted by Perich at 2:04 pm

Forbes.com has published an op-ed that is the least literate thing I’ve read since the last time I read a Forbes.com op-ed. And I’m not talking about content. I’m talking purely about the ability to string a sentence together and make its meaning clear.

Some highlights:

Call me prejudice [sic], but if the credibility of an organization is inversely proportional to tattoos and body piercings per square inch, this is a movement of dim prospects.

[...]

Since attending the Houston rally, the movement has metastasized globally to include hundreds of thousands or even a several millions. [The movement attended the Houston rally? It could now number 'a several millions'?]

Notwithstanding, the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, even egged on by our president, so far, in my opinion, has little more than nuisance value. [Not enough clauses separated by commas. Could you add seven or twelve more?]

[...]

Apparently, it was monumental injustice that the big bad bank was enforcing its contractual rights in light of over a year of non- payment. Comfort in being surrounded by the same species of fish. Engulfed in a haze of nescience was all I could feel. [Could someone tell me what that second sentence is describing or modifying? And is there an easier way to phrase that third sentence?]

And that’s just a casual scan. This is embarrassingly poor writing. If someone found this on my blog, the same blog where I write about video games, I would be mortified. Forbes is a respected business periodical.

Finger seeds his rant with words like “metastasizing” and “nescience” to give the illusion of being well-read. But people who actually read a lot know how to string a sentence together. I can’t say with certainty that Finger used a thesaurus to find the densest possible synonym for “ignorance” (“ooh, nescience looks promising”). But Finger can’t say with certainty what a protester’s “indeterminate hair color” looks like. C’mon, Dick: greenish? pinkish? Take a stab at it.

While it would be irresponsible of me to judge Richard B. Finger of Ariadne Capital as an investor based on one column of garbage, that doesn’t stop Finger from judging the rigor of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement based on a few colorful characters, so here I go: Richard B. Finger of Ariadne Capital is a fraud. He puts tremendous effort into appearing smarter than he is. He is incapable of clear and insightful language, suggesting he’s incapable of clear and insightful thought. I can’t say that his inability to form a coherent sentence guarantees that his investments will fail, but I can say it doesn’t make them more likely to succeed.

To bring it from style back to subject: Forbes.com is so desperate for anti-protest content that they’ll throw a sub-literate peasant, the sort of ranting hack who would make a LaRouchie roll his eyes, on their op-ed page. They’ll throw him up without any sort of editing, or vetting, because they need the pageviews. Righteous conservatives will link to it to make fun of hippies; irate progressives will link to it in order to get mad. This is the face, or rather death mask, of traditional media.

Oct

hong kong, part 2

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

(Part 1)

Between Tsim Sha Tsui, Central and Wan Chai, about one of every forty people you pass on the street is Caucasian. If they’re not wearing a tailored suit, they’re tourists. The ratio gets even lower once you get out of downtown. I had never been to a city where I was that much of an ethnic minority, so it was fascinating^*. No one pointed and stared, although we got a few odd glances on Sunday morning.
… which may have been because we were up too early. Almost nothing in Hong Kong opens before 10:00 AM. Sylvia and I would frequently wander through vast malls, peeking in the windows of shuttered establishments and checking our watches. It’s odd, being the only two people in a shopping center. Once 10:00 AM rolls around, however, the population goes from zero to millions in a few minutes.
The leisurely hours made finding breakfast hard. Sylvia and I usually found a corner bakery to satiate us. The food was decent but heavy, a legacy of 99 years of British rule. Hong Kong pastries follow the British rule of taking any two meats, adding cheese and stuffing it in a roll. I had a tuna/salmon roll in a croissant one morning; Sylvia had “special ham toast.”
I thought I was avoiding the worst of typhoon season when I booked, but we got intermittent showers all week. Also the humidity that that implies. Bring a bottle of water with you if you plan to do any walking outdoors.
Everything is in English. Everyone speaks enough English to do their job for a couple of polite Westerners. The currency is intuitive: colorful bills, change that goes from small to large in value. Flagging down a server can be difficult, though. Waiters don’t hover as they do in the States: you have to wave one over and start making demands. And if your waiter isn’t sure of her English skills, she might find an excuse to hit other tables first.
If you tire of Chinese food, it’s easy enough to find a Western franchise on your block. McCafe’s are everywhere, all open 24 hours. Burger King, KFC and Pizza Hut are popular too. I was curious about Kowloon’s interpretation of the Whopper but Sylvia insisted we stick to local cuisine. I relented, but under duress. Though I can’t prove it, I have a strong suspicion that the meat in your typical yum cha chain is no more “local” than the meat in your typical Burger King. It all rolled off the same COSCO container.

Crowds filling the streets for National Day in Kowloon.

_________________
* Making a connecting flight in Atlanta doesn’t count.

Sep

words, words, words

Posted by Perich at 1:39 pm

Book sellers are unhappy with Amazon’s growing domination of the publishing industry:

“Amazon is holding the entire book industry hostage,” says Oren Teicher, CEO of the American Booksellers Association. “First they disintermediated retailers, and now it’s publishers and authors.”

Not to poke fun at a man who’ll be unemployed in 5 years, but if you’re in the business of selling books and you think disintermediate is an acceptable word, you deserve to lose your job.

Feb

leave all your love and your loving behind

Posted by Perich at 9:49 am

Should I pick on Tom Friedman? I don’t know. Seeing a new Tom Friedman column is like running into a Lyndon LaRouche agitator in Park Street station, scratching his thinning hair, asking me which subway goes to Harvard. I could point out his mistakes, sure, but I’m much more likely to send him on the wrong train.

Tom Friedman, welcome to Mattapan:

Just when you think the Egyptian uprising is dying down, more Egyptians than ever waited in long lines on Tuesday to get into Tahrir Square to ask President Hosni Mubarak’s regime to go. One reason the lines get so long is that everyone has to funnel through a single makeshift Egyptian Army checkpoint, which consists of an American-made tank on one side and barbed wire on the other. I can never tell whether that tank is there to protect the protesters or to limit the protesters.

Fuck me standing, I hope this is a joke. This has to be a joke, right? Or at least the mustache’s attempt at breezy irony? Protect the protesters from whom, Friedman? From the other tanks?

Thinking about this for literally no more than 30 seconds makes the answer obvious. Tanks are not defensive elements. They’re offensive. They’re meant to roll across rough terrain and blow holes in fortifications or massed lines of infantry. But you wouldn’t ring a city with tanks to protect the city. A tank loses one of its biggest advantages, mobility, when it’s sitting still. At that point, a couple of decent grenades could wreck its treads. In fact, the only sort of force a tank could defend against would be … civilians with improvised weapons.

Right now Egypt’s respected army is staying neutral — protecting both Mubarak’s palace and the Tahrir revolutionaries — but it can’t last. This is a people’s army. The generals have to heed where the public is going — and today so many Egyptians voted with their feet to go into Tahrir Square that a friend of mine said: “It was like being on the hajj in Mecca.”

It says a lot of how target-rich a Friedman column is that I can overlook the merely laughable (“respected army”, “people’s army”, “the generals have to heed”) to zoom in on the picayune. To call the Tahrir Square protests “voting with [one's] feet” isn’t even a euphemism; it’s an insult. Protests are a raw, risky and passionate means of expressing one’s ideology. Voting is safe and civilized. Indeed, the best thing that can be said about voting is that it’s a more peaceful alternative to rioting in the street every four years. Protesting isn’t “voting with your feet”; voting is “protesting peacefully.” It’s like calling murder “a disagreement over knifability.”

But Friedman’s got a theme, damn it, and the conventions of the English language get run over like protestors under a tank’s treads so he can get there. Friedman’s questionable thesis – that the army is holding back because they love the anonymous masses more than the guy who signs their checks – requires that the generals pay attention to the protestors. So, if the army is listening to the people … and the people are in the square … then … then the army must be in the square! So that’s why Tahrir Square is surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards! It’s the transitive principle, silly!

The Tahrir Square uprising “has nothing to do with left or right,” said Dina Shehata, a researcher at Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. “It is about young people rebelling against a regime that has stifled all channels for their upward mobility. They want to shape their own destiny, and they want social justice” from a system in which a few people have gotten fantastically rich, in giant villas, and everyone else has stagnated. Any ideological group that tries to hijack these young people today will lose.

Except Friedman, of course. Friedman isn’t just “any” ideological group; he’s THE ideological group.

The rest of the column is typical Friedman: his “post-ideological” worldview that is, in fact, highly ideological; his desire to reduce everyone’s motives to not just a paycheck, but a 401(k); his theory that everyone in the world wants to be a sales engineer Segwaying to work and making iPhone apps in their spare time. That’s stock Friedman and I can’t fault the man for owning his schtick.

But the hoops he has to leap through to pretend that the Egyptian army is a neutral third party to the whole affair! “Hrm, APCs aren’t rolling through the streets machine-gunning civilians. Are we on the verge of a new Arab democracy?” No, you twit.

I’m no expert on the Nile, but I feel safe in assuming that when the same man has ruled the country for 30 years, no one enlists with him unless they want power. And now that Mubarrak’s in danger, the grunts are waiting to see what the officers are doing. The officers are waiting to see what the generals are doing. And the generals are waiting to see if Suleiman can take the reins as Mubarrak tumbles off the horse.

So everyone with something to lose is biding their time and covering their ass. Which, come to think of it, fits pretty well with Friedman’s “the world is a corporation” theme. Even a blind squirrel finds a stopped clock twice a day, or something.

Jun

sentence begins indented with formality

Posted by Perich at 10:27 am

My friend Tom, a lawyer in D.C., passed me this link last week to a job application gone awry. I don’t know that I’m the intended audience for this sort of train wreck, though. Most of the people who commented on the e-mail exchange were amused / offended at the paralegal’s ignorance (“it’s amazing that the MA bar lets women practice law”).

In my opinion, though, the chain of e-mails should never have got that far. Because someone who writes an e-mail like this has no business working for a law firm:

I do not know why you are hesitant after seeing my work experience, education and with speaking with me? Were my writing samples not to your standard because I did do very well in that class and that’s why I brought them to give you a sample of what I can do. [...]

I can do any type of Motion, and research. I do not think a 30 day trial period is necessary. I would prefer bring me on full time to show you my capabilities.

The first sentence is improperly punctuated and duplicates the word “with” for no reason. The second sentence is three run-on sentences. The third sentence has a needless comma. The fifth and final sentence should read “I would prefer for you to bring me on full time …”; without those three words, it’s gibberish.

If there’s any type of e-mail you’d hope would be written to reverential standards of grammar, it’d be a job application to a law firm. You’re coming to them hat in hand, looking for work. You need to demonstrate that you can represent the firm with a professional attitude. All of this should suggest the need for a clear, demanding style. But even if your writing isn’t exceptional, it ought to at least be mediocre! It ought to at least communicate concepts in a clear way!

After getting an e-mail like that, why continue the discussion? Why would you even consider hiring someone who thinks that’s an acceptable way to communicate to a potential employer?

Then again, the e-mail that the law firm sent the applicant, which prompted this inarticulate response, contains the following:

I have to confess, I am on the fence about offering you a position. This is a thought I had…tell me your thoughts.

I think, if I am right, you would be a good addition to take over the legal flow of work that I don’t have time to get to. As you are a law student, in addition to your experience, I think that it will work. But, while I
looked at your writing samples, I feel the need to see your work product before offering you a position. I guess we could do a 30 day trial period, but I hate to waste anyone’s time.

What are your thoughts with me giving you a few projects and over the next week you could do them here at the office or from home.

Nothing as bad as the law student’s e-mail. But:

“This is a thought I had…tell me your thoughts.” That sentence could have used a skeptical glance.
“As you are a law student, in addition to your experience, I think that it will work.” I’m not sure what the clause “in addition to your experience” modifies here.
The last sentence is clear enough, but an easily avoidable run-on.

This e-mail is from the law firm that the student wants to apply to! These are the supposed professionals! And they’re only marginally better.

I have a sneaking fear that mine is the last generation that will write e-mails in complete sentences. It’s nothing but commas, run-ons, and “????????” from here on out.

Feb

everybody's at disadvantage speaking with their second language

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 10:34 am

So I’m at a bar on Saturday with the other jiu-jitsu students after one of our own promoted to nidan, or second degree black belt. We rented the back room in one of the nightclubs on Boylston St, less than a block from where I work. The outside’s full of scheming scenesters with unbuttoned shirts; the back room is quiet and full of fellow students. One of these has just returned from a year in Israel, where he practiced krav maga four hours a day six days a week. He has a friend with him from Paris, who has black belts in karate and jiu-jitsu. The Parisian speaks good enough English to point across the bar I’m leaning on and ask, “What’s tonic water?”

“Well,” I begin, “it’s water that’s … tonic. Y’know, like in … gin and tonics?” My voice tightens, already apologizing for my own words.

The visitor asks the bartender for a glass of tonic, with ice, a straw (“a pipe”) and some lemon. He stirs and takes a sip. “It’s like a Schweppes,” he declares.

One of the reasons I want to be a writer – and one of the reasons I suspect I come across as a pedant – is because I’m always looking for the best possible way to convey something. I’m never satisfied with a “clear enough” explanation. When I give directions, they have to incorporate street names, landmarks, turns and fail-safes (“if you hit Trinity Church, you’ve gone too far”). When I describe someone, you not only need to know what they look and sound like, but which celebrity they resemble; if I can describe them in a way that makes you chuckle, so much the better. And when someone who speaks perfect conversational English asks me what tonic water is, I need something better than “it’s got quinine in it.”

I care more about whether something’s evocative than whether or not it’s true. Not that we can ignore truth – nothing turns me off more than the line or description that rings false – but it waits its turn behind the image. If I share a common language with someone but not a common culture, I want to find the words that bridge that history.

The bartender produces the gin and tonic I didn’t order. I was thirsty anyway. I slide a packet of bills across while the Parisian describes the search for a valid form of identification for the bouncers outside. “In the States they check your ID,” he explains. “In Paris, they check your shoes.”

Jan

most friendship is feigning; most loving mere folly

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 8:54 am

Directing Discount Shakespeare: As You Like It In Forty-Five Minutes has made my weeks more exciting. For one thing, I picked a really good cast. They show up every night enthused to tackle the material. For another, I’m happy to be back in the theater again. I love having a show in production.

But mostly, directing’s been fun because it gives me a chance to play John Barton twice a week.

I have to restrain myself from turning every rehearsal into a Lecture on What Professor Coldheart Thinks About Shakespeare. That’d be immensely boring. Plus, while I think Shakespeare’s continual performance over the last four centuries is no accident, I don’t think he had a God-like command over language. There’s not an hour’s worth of debate to be had over each word choice, each change in accent, or each metaphor.

Shakespeare was a pro, and pros work under deadline.

But reading Shakespeare with an eye toward performing it does yield a tremendous amount of insight. And if I can’t bore my cast, I can certainly bore you.

Here is an excerpt of a monologue from Jaques, companion of the exiled Duke, from Act II, Scene 7 of As You Like It:

I must have liberty
Withal, as large a charter as the wind,
To blow on whom I please; for so fools have;
And they that are most galled with my folly,
They most must laugh. And why, sir, must they so?
The ‘why’ is plain as way to parish church:
He that a fool doth very wisely hit
Doth very foolishly, although he smart,
Not to seem senseless of the bob

First, the obvious bits: what is Jaques actually saying in plain English? Jaques is petitioning the Duke to become the fool in his exiled court. He’s explaining the ways a fool enforces order in the court: those whom he offends the most must laugh the most as well. If a court jester offends you, you should laugh louder than anyone else. Making it clear that you feel offended jeopardizes your reputation.

That’s just a matter of careful reading and interpretation, but it’s essential. Shakespeare wrote his lines in blank verse (iambic pentameter) to make them easier to remember and deliver. As such, it’s very easy to deliver a Shakespearean monologue prettily without having the slightest idea what it means. Anyone who has an ear for rhythm, can fake a British accent and can project their voice can stumble their way through a soliloquy.

Second, why did Shakespeare use the words he did? This we can only guess at, since he didn’t leave footnotes. In fact, the surviving texts we have aren’t written in exactly his hand: they were copied from show notes, meant to be read and memorized by actors but never kept.

So, my guesses:

And why sir, must they so? The ‘why’ is plain as way … that a fool doth very wisely hit doth very foolishly …: There’s a lot of opportunity in here for a quick-tongued actor to play with words here. We have “why,” “why” and “way” in rapid succession, as well as “fool doth very wisely” and “doth very foolishly.” There’s opportunity for good sing-song bouncing between internal rhymes here.
as plain as way to parish church. Shakespeare devotes a lot of text to making fun of churchmen. As You Like It is no exception, with the bumbling vicar Sir Oliver Martext. This is probably meant sarcastically, especially considering the reasoning that follows is hardly “plain.”
fool / wisely / foolishly / smart / senseless. Parallels and inversions on the notion of being wise or smart and being foolish or senseless. Note that Shakespeare doesn’t use the latter two in that same meaning: “smart” means “to feel a pain” here; “senseless” means “not feeling.”

And that’s only about half of the line.

This isn’t just fodder for English majors, mind you. Think how odd the idiom “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” would sound if you heard it without the emphasis on “old” and “new.” Those are the most important words in the metaphor: the contrast between old and new, and the implication that past a certain point learning is impossible. Shakespeare used similar contrasts and parallels in his metaphors. Recognizing them, and learning how to call them out, will make your performances more memorable.

If you still don’t believe me, watch some more of those Playing Shakespeare clips online. The difference between watching a half-good amateur stumble through King John and watching Patrick Stewart deliver it should make it clear. There’s more to Shakespeare than being loud and British.

Jan

but we've got the biggest balls of them all

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 7:00 am

Talking with a very good friend of mine last week, we mentioned a mutual female acquaintance whom, I said, “had the ovaries to pull something like that off.”

“Huh?” my friend asked.

“Like saying, ‘she had the balls to pull it off.’ Only, y’know, ovaries.”

“Right, right; I got that.” I still got the quizzical look, though.

“I figured it’s diminutive to refer to a woman as ‘having balls’ to do something because she’s confident. ‘Oh, congratulations at having presence. You’ve been promoted to ‘Male.’ ”

“I’m with you,” my friend said. “But at the same time, I’m not comfortable with females getting special female-only titles that distinguish them from male roles. Like ‘actress,’ which is the same thing as an actor, but female. As if there’s some inherent difference in a woman’s performance than a man’s.”

“Fair enough,” I said.

(We settled on cojones, which means “balls” but is obscured by the language barrier and retains neutrality)

But the question lingers in my mind.

There’s a wealth of jargon in English to encourage someone to take bold action, and all of it points at a guy’s crotch. A guy with confidence has “balls”; astonishing confidence, “big brass ones.” Someone who needs to show confidence is told to “sack up” or “grow a pair”; someone who lacks confidence is a “pussy.” One of my favorite lines from The French Connection comes when an American mobster needs to convince his boss that French druglord Alain Charnier is a cold-hearted operator. “This guy’s got ‘em like THAT!”, the mobster yells, making a cupping motion under his crotch. It’s a guttural, striking image, and it conveys the message in a heartbeat.

So how do you describe a woman with confidence? Let’s ignore for the moment the tendency of many people to refer to women exhibiting confidence, a refusal to be interrupted or a low tolerance for errors as “bitchy.” Not because that’s not a problem, mind, but because that’d be its own 1000-word post. For now, let’s settle on the problem of language.

We can’t erase ten thousand years of linguistic development, so we can’t get people to stop referring to confidence as “ballsy.” That’s not an option. So our remaining options appear to be:

Appropriate that language for women as well, reproductive irony be damned. That chick’s got balls; you see that?
Invent parallel language for women. Doubting yourself isn’t going to get the job done. Now egg up and get back out there.
Create some gender-neutral term that’ll work well for both. Now this one’s got some real gametes, walking up and saying that.
A fourth option that I haven’t figured out yet.

I ask not because I’m looking for the Orthodox Answer From Feminism (there isn’t one, and that’s a good thing). Rather, I want a good colloquial way to talk about the women I respect. Also, I like stirring up interesting discussions about language on Mondays.

Nov

we never did too much talking anyway

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 7:00 am

I would like the following euphemisms excised from polite speech:

“It is what it is.” No. I disagree. Now let’s fight over it.

It doesn’t much help that “it is what it is” most often surfaces as a sort of cheery fatalism, an unwillingness to tackle a problem. We can’t change the facts! If I wrap this statement in tautology, it becomes self-evident! It is what it is, and it can’t be what it’s not, which we’d rather, so let it be.

(We mock “it is what it is” on the Overthinking It podcast pretty often)
“Now, more than ever …” I find millennialism repulsive in all its forms, but this euphemism dates back centuries. We live in Interesting Times, completely different from any Times that existed in the Past! For one, children disrespect their elders! Illness is rampant in the cities and the lower classes groan in poverty! Also, there are barbarians in the outermost provinces!

I can’t think of many crises, ills or challenges that affect me and my friends now more than they ever did a comparable group of people in the past.
“I just wanted to say that …” Right. I understood that you wanted to say that, as evidenced by the fact that you said it. You don’t need to remind me that you’re a sentient being, my recent experiments in biological reductionism notwithstanding.

This one doesn’t seem harmful. It’s the sort of throat-clearing we all engage in before getting to the interesting part of a sentence. But verbiage that doesn’t communicate information or mood is harmful. We read or hear it often enough and we start glossing over it. And glossing over speech puts language in the service of evil.
“Society …” as the subject of a sentence. “Society” is not an agent of action. Society doesn’t tell men or women to do things. Society doesn’t take away your job. Now while there are impersonal, institutional forces at work that circumscribe the lives of people that no member of that force will ever meet – i.e., I can be limited by the Church’s views on marriage even if I never set foot in a church – it aids nothing to call that force “society.” No one ever got butter on their bread by talking more abstractly.
“There are two kinds of people in the world …” The distinction between x and non-x rarely bears fruit outside of pre-school pedagogy, collegiate logic textbooks and high-level programming, yet you can find it in the Washington Post editorial page with sad regularity. This distinction never works. Half the time, it’s so tautological as to be useless (“there are two kinds of people in the world: members of The Rolling Stones, and the rest of us”). The other half, it draws a false dichotomy.

A peer educator in my high school once passed along the following wisdom from his grandmother, about the two kinds of people in the world: “those who learn from experience, and those who learn from everyone else’s experience.” And while it was an interesting point at the time, useful to the moral of the lesson (namely, Don’t Do Drugs), it’s a false dichotomy. What about people who don’t learn and keep making the same mistakes? What about people who learn from fictional experience – who were scared off of heroin by Requiem for a Dream? What about people who expect a situation to turn out poorly, like a midnight road trip to Vegas, but who do it anyway because they want the experience? All of these could be acknowledged and glossed over, if the speaker hadn’t framed the story with the “two kinds of people” trope.
“You owe it to yourself …” Then I default on the obligation. Who’s going to come collect?
“Tiny favor” / “Huge favor” Have you noticed that the effort requested by that phrase is inversely proportional to the word used? Moving a couch is a “tiny favor”; answering the phone while you pee is a “huge favor.”
“At least I’m doing something!” This sentence only lives in rebuttals. Someone advances a plan: let’s hold a bake sale to save our school; let’s burn the house down and use the insurance money to pay off our debt; let’s bomb villages to catch terrorists, et cetera. Someone else points out that the plan might not work: we won’t pay off a ten thousand dollar debt with brownie money; insurance companies employ sophisticated arson investigators; bombing villages will create the sort of dissatisfaction that terrorists arise from, and so forth. The response, “Well, at least I’m doing something. What are you doing?”

Most of us get embarrassed when we realize we forgot a crucial variable in the success of our plan. But “at least I’m doing something!” trumpets your apathy boldly. So what if my plan won’t work? Plans don’t have to work in order to be good. They just have to be bold! Action trumps thought; all forward motion is progress; idle hands are the devil’s playground.
Blog / photoblog / liveblog / vlog / bleg. I mean, come on.

Jun

I'm a sinner, I'm a saint; I do not feel ashamed

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 7:45 am

Christine pointed out last week that all of UrbanDictionary’s definitions of feminism are pretty wretched. I navigated over to check and, sure enough, it’s some kind of travesty. It’s a rather well-cloaked travesty, don’t get me wrong – all sorts of intellectual shit like “if feminism were really about equality, it would be called humanism.”¹ It’s the same sort of shit you see every Martin Luther King, Jr. day in conservative magazines and weblogs, when neocons argue that the Reverend Doctor would have opposed Affirmative Action – because King was about color-blindness, not color-preference.²

Anyhow, while noting with approval that each definition had more DOWN votes than UP votes by a factor of 300% or more, I saw a link to Urban Dictionary: Fularious Street Slang Defined. It’s a book that you can buy on Amazon which compiles definitions of some of the terms you find on UrbanDictionary. Hopefully the author picked some less controversial ones, like “crunk” or “upper decking.”

My thoughts:

What a delightful regression in medium! If UrbanDictionary has any value at all – still in debate – it’s that anyone in the world can update entries. This may not produce the most useful results (see “feminism”), but crowd-sourcing has certain advantages. Especially for a slang dictionary. So the smartest course, obvi, is to freeze a current view of the palimpsest and embed it in unchanging text. What if someone comes up with a hep new definition? Why, then we totes issue a new book! Who needs hypertext when you have crippletext?
Aaron Peckham, the “compiler” of these books, has found a sweet scam that I want in on. UrbanDictionary is 99% user-generated content with a smattering of HTML, CSS and maybe some PHP. In other words, a few million people just put money in Peckham’s pocket. Maybe they’ll get contributor cred (this entry for “John Blaze” comes to us courtesy of Dat Nicca D, although DRM took objection). I want a million people to do work – for free, of course – that I can get paid for. See also: the PostSecret book.

Way to go, Internet!
_________________________
¹ Which, of course, Gloria Steinem actually called it. Oops!

² And maybe the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr would have been opposed to affirmative action. Who knows? That’s still a pretty disingenuous argument for a white guy to make.