Funny, I was just wondering whether anyone had used as the basis for a story a world where no-one can individually discriminate between dreamt and real events.

Think of the legal system....

An elaboration I don't think would work: everything you've dreamt is remembered as having happened on Dreamday, the eighth day of the week---this probably being influenced by the band name "Eleventh Dream Day".

Ah, the fungibility of memory. As Frost said, someday I shall say I took the one less taken, and that shall make all the difference, even if I didn't.

Over the years, I've played with the idea of a city of memory—functioning like a medieval memory palace—with an independent, though non-physical, existence. If you can imagine it well enough to find it, you can explore more of it and learn new things.

In retrospect, I think I derived the ambience of the city of memory from the book I quoted in this post, though the specific idea is not part of the work.

This wins the Internet today: http://community.livejournal.com/metaquotes/6644038.html

ceruleanst writes:

ACT I SCENE 2. A road, morning. Enter a carriage, with JULES and VINCENT, murderers.

J: And know'st thou what the French name cottage pie?

V: Say they not cottage pie, in their own tongue?

J: But nay, their tongues, for speech and taste alike

Are strange to ours, with their own history:

Gaul knoweth not a cottage from a house.

V: What say they then, pray?

J: Hachis Parmentier.

V: Hachis Parmentier! What name they cream?

J: Cream is but cream, only they say le crème.

V: What do they name black pudding?

J: I know not;

I visited no inn it could be bought.

There's more. So much more. It made my day.

Does anyone know of any good 'deep value' handbag makers? Ever since that thread, I've realized the annoyingly short lifespan of my purses/handbags/shoulderbags. I have a bunch of them, but most of them were impulse buys because I liked the outward design, or gifts that are pretty and sturdy but have at least one fatal design flaw.

My current one is ideal in size, but the fastener has gone and was never very good to begin with, so I'm constantly paranoid I'll lose something. I'm looking to invest in something that will stay with me, put up with abuse, and still look presentable.

What I'm looking for now is a bag big enough to hold two books, two small bottles of water, and a small lunch but that would still 'read' to a security person as 'purse' not 'messenger bag' or 'backpack.' Ideally it would have a lot of interior pockets for organization (one of the other weaknesses of my current one.)

I'm willing to make an investment (policemen's boots and all that) but am entirely uninterested in 'brands.' I own several Tom Binh backpacks/luggage items and have considered getting one of their smaller bags as a purse, but I was wondering if anyone knew of a more conventionally styled bag-maker who actually produced items that are functional and LAST.

Ooo, Invisible Cities! I really liked Invisible Cities, though I could never finish If On A Winter's Night A Traveller, which my lit geek friends assure me is the worthier effort.

In the category of "Shakesperian pastiche", I submit for your approval... Hamlet meets Doctor Who.

Some time ago, I tried to rewrite Sonnet 116 ("Let me not the marriage of true minds/Admit impediments...") in C pseudocode, but it turned out sort of boring and lame instead of funny and geeky. I haven't messed with pastiche since. (Though I *am* toying with a vague idea for a modern Canterbury Tale.)

Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities?

Non Sequitur

Joe ducked low, zigzagged through the alley, darted into the street, ignored the honks of angry drivers and made it to the sidewalk, vaulted over a wall, dodged an angry Rottweiler to climb a chain link fence, climbed into a window, sidled into the kitchen and grabbed a cookie from the cookie jar, snuck out the back door ran down the side yard, dashed into the woods, strolled down the path , followed the gravel road past the old abandoned farmhouse, and was almost home, when he clumsily tripped over a clause, smacked his head painfully on a comma, suffered traumatic amnesia, and forgot the subject of this sentence.

Euphemia: A Fantasia on Invisible Cities

There are two things they do not tell you when they wave you through the lines of camels, of burros laden with beads, strings of dried figs and memories of the latest fireworks display over the canals of Venice: you must lose a memory to get a memory. There are some memories that respectable people do not trade.

You find these out soon enough for yourself.

At first, you trade one memory for another that seems better, and feel rich: the palace intrigues, the memories of stars' births, that you get in exchange for the single memory of blowing the fluff off a dandelion at age five. The merchant weighs your memory in his scales, bites it to test its purity; he is satisfied when it spits a few white puffs into the air. They are carried on the currents through the bazaar where the people swirl in cloaks of red and yellow and blue, and disappear in the dust of a place where dandelions have never grown. What is a dandelion? you wonder, thinking this, and decide that it must be the name of this dark corridor where courtiers plot and whisper, or otherwise the explosion of light at the heart of the nebula.

Eventually, full of memories not your own, you perhaps forget yourself a little, or worse, remember yourself only as your darkest deeds: all you have left. You are desperate to get rid of them; you try to palm them off on passersby. One, taking pity on you, turns you toward a shadowed alleyway where customers and sellers whisper and look over their shoulders as they complete transactions, blackmails of the mind. You are reminded of hallways, a dandelion.

You enter the fray. You sell off the time you screamed at your mother before you left Venice and never returned, you sell off the time you broke your leg, you sell off memories of your black night-thoughts, the ones that prey when you cannot sleep. Someone is always willing to buy, and you leave with memories of quenching strange urges that you are sure you never had, of murder and of making your five-year-old daughter cry. You have no daughter.

*

"Rich" is one of the words you traded early, and because you are a shrewd businessman and canny, you got two memories for your one, both from a native of the town:

The richest man in Euphemia is a messenger who runs the most important memories between the high houses and richest merchants' stalls--all the great memories in the city pass through his head, but do not stay there. The houses and merchants appreciate his trustworthiness, discretion, promptness, and tip him lavishly with gold when he arrives at his destination. Memory is not the only coin the city accepts; he could buy Euphemia if he wished.

The richest man is else a tinker so poor he begs on the streets for bread and fights the rats for rancid meat. He has never traded a memory. Some, bitter, call him the stingiest man in the city, but he smiles more than anyone else.

*

The man with whom you traded looks to you, asks if you might know his name. You shake your head, realize what he can no more: the word "Euphemia" was his last hoard.

Moved now by pity to keep your end of bargains he no longer knows he made, for alms you--generous, rich, young and stupid--give to him memories of dandelions.

The name 'Euphemia' reminds me irresistibly of Euphemia Williams a politician* from Westmoreland, Jamaica. She was notable for being the candidate the Jamaica Labour Party ran against P.J. Patterson, Jamaica's longest serving prime minister, which means that she only won once, in 1980, when his party, the People's National Party was swept from power decisively (he wasn't PM then, Michael Manley was).

Anyway, Euphemia sticks in my memory not only because she was a perennial loser, except that once, but because in her official party photograph she was shown giving her party sign, the Winstonian v-for-victory sign, backwards. As a native Londoner I could only say 'oh, dear!'.

Leah @#5

I've been buying LeSportSac bags for some time. They are nylon, and therefore light and durable and somewhat washable. They close by a variety of means, zippers and snaps and magnets. I prefer zippers, though they eventually wear out, but while they work, they work reliably. They come in a variety of colors, patterns and sizes. Most have several compartments. The one I am currently using has two outside zippered compartments, and a main compartment, and a little inside one reached from the main one.

They are not cheap, but I think they are worth the money. Macy's carries them, but I don't know of other places. They also have a website:

http://www.lesportsac.com/

A "house of memory" is also a memory-training exercise, often associated with the Tarot.

That is, having memorized the cards, you would visualize each of them as rooms (or perhaps corridors, according to the Qabalistic mapping). That lets you store memories in them, effectively "indexing" them by association. Naturally it can work with almost any other structured set of images; the point is just to provide a framework for associations.

Has anybody ever written a fantasy story about dust jackets? No, not a book's dust jacket, but a literal one, maybe one worn by an earth spirit?

That "Library Thing" website is neat. I currently keep my records in an Excel spreadsheet. I should definitely thing about uploading it.

Cassandra, #9: Wow. Just... wow.

#13 ::: Serge :::

In Macleod's The Cassini Division, Iain M. Banks' Matter, and probably a whole lot of other stories as well, characters wear clothing/spacesuits made up of a large number of very tiny machines that work together---"flocking" potentially in more ways than one. This is nanotech inspired by fantasy, and well might be considered still in that realm.

(M. Banks, in another book, has an entire assassin just drifting in past planetary defences one mote at a time, then assembling itself into swift and dusty vengeance.)

Two things. First, the cat/theremin sidelight is fricken hilarious. Just had to say that. With a house brimming with cats, that cat is fricken awesome.

Secondly, what is a cheesebear?

Today I celebrated my cat Gypsy's birthday. I don't know the actual day, but he was estimated to be 3 months old when I adopted him in mid-July 1990. At 18, he is thin and frail, but his sight, hearing, and appetite are good, and he still holds his own with the younger cats. He got a dab of cream cheese, a little sliver of butter, and lots of cuddling for his birthday.

He does not play the theremin.

David@12, memory palaces are significantly older than the Tarot, altho perhaps not older than cartomancy in general (did the Romans have playing cards?). It dates back to the ancient Roman schools of rhetoric (there are three main classical references, one is a brief comment by Cicero, the others are what remains of the "Ad Herennium", and something by Quintilian). One of the most definitive works of scholarship on the memory palace tradition is "The Art of Memory" by Frances Yates (which I happen to be reading piecemeal right now).

Leah Miller @ 5 -- you might also consider the Tom Binh-like company "Red Oxx" (redoxx.com). I've only bought large duffles from them, but they make a couple of items that might suit. Again, these aren't cheap -- but the zippers are the really heavy-duty YKK brand and the seams are properly bound. Cordura is basically indestructable if the seams don't pull out, so these should last a good long time.

As an aside, the large duffles I got from them are a bargain at $50. For those of you who need duffles. They also have smaller sizes at smaller prices, suitable for jump bags.

Anne, i wish your kitty a few more years. I had my first cat Aja go until about 18, when she had a brief illness and then basically winked out (she did have to be euthanized) and my third cat had a 19-year run and passed on her own after announcing it to the only member of the household awake that morning. I took her to the mortuary for cremation myself with many tears. (I am surprised at how good I am at driving and crying, but helping mom take care of dad in his dying days sort of trained me...)

I did have one cat that had to be euthanized early (11 y-o) because he got kidney disease and he was a nasty cat to any veterinary care. and a cat that we adopted at about 10-12 that was 17-18 when his kidney disease finally took him, we'd extended his life a long time with Sub-Q fluids and medication, and held him until he couldn't take any more.

You WILL know that time for your friend, I assure you. It makes it okay, in a way, because you know you've given them the best in the time they have. When they're not enjoying the day-to-day, it's time.

all my best.

Leah @5, I've been carrying Bagg Lady bags for more than ten years, and my oldest one still looks totally fine.

I have three sizes (really small, large and really extra large), three colors (navy, burgundy, and black) and two different styles (regular and sling back). They're all pleather or psuede, and I just wash 'em, throw them in a zip style plastic bag, squish out all the air, and store in the bottom drawer of my dresser when I'm not using them.

Something odd....

I was just browsing the fictionwise listing for The magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and it lists the author as "Spilogale Authors". Spilogale, according to Wikipedia, is a genus of Skunk.

Interesting joke...I wonder whose it is?

Oh, Invisible Cities is one of my favorites.

So far the only other Calvino I've read is Castle of Crossed Destiny, and I found it oddly unsatisfying to the point of boredom. Writing stories based on Tarot cards is not a trivial task. The one time I tried it, anyway, the results were less than inspiring. (I'd post a link to the attempt, but the web page appears to be misbehaving at the moment - it keeps claiming to find no rows in the database even though they're right there. I'll have to troubleshoot it in the morning.)

Of course, having posted a statement like that, I expect any number of people on this thread will take it as a challenge. I'd enjoy that.

Cassandra, btw, you totally won my internets with that post, and my heart with its final paragraph.

My injured-but-still-relatively-hale 15-year-old pointer would love a theremin, but I don't think she could do justice to it the way those cats do.

> a world where no-one can individually discriminate between dreamt and real events

I recently read something with a very similar premise. Spoilers:

Gur Qbpgbe Jub abiry Gur Fgrnyref bs Qernzf. Vg gheaf bhg gung cerivbhfyl qrgrpgrq zvpeb-betnavfzf ba gur pbybal cynarg unir haqrezvarq gur novyvgl bs gur uhzna oenva gb qvfgvathvfurq orgjrra npghny frafbel vachg naq vzntvarq riragf.

Cassandra?

That's really good. "What is a dandelion?"

May I humbly suggest you submit this for publication? Perhaps here.

Funny, my edition of The Dictionary of Imaginary Places describes lots of Calvino's Invisible Cities, but not Euphemia. Maybe Euphemia is particularly invisible? Perhaps it's been listed in the newest edition.

Michael Turyn @ 16... Banks, in another book, has an entire assassin just drifting in past planetary defences one mote at a time, then assembling itself into swift and dusty vengeance

An assassin made of dust, in the vacuum? I hope his name wasn't Hoover.

Thanks, Lee, Nicole, and Doug.

Doug--thanks for the suggestion. I'll give it a shot.

Cassandra... A much belated wow. And may I recommend your sending this to Realms of Fantasy?

The Romans did not have playing cards. The popularity of cards is one of the consequences of printing.

Serge @13 -

There was an old Outer Limits episode about a monster (a dust monster?) that was sucked into a vacuum cleaner.

Also, Spirited Away had those soot sprites in the furnace room who hustled pieces of coal to the furnace.

There's something I've been wondering about for a while now, and I'm hoping you all won't mind indulging my curiosity.

How do you keep up with Making Light? What I mean is, how do you spot the new posts, comments, and particles/sidelights? I'm not as efficient at it as I'd like to be, and I'm looking for possible tips or a new way of managing it.

I have the main page in my RSS reader, so I always know when a new post goes up, but my reader (bloglines) doesn't work with comment threads.* I've had the best success so far by bookmarking the last comment of any thread I'm reading, then periodically going to all the bookmarks to see if there are new comments. Every so often, I go to the main page and check for new particles and sidelights.

It works fairly well, but it does mean that I don't notice comments on older threads, and I spend a lot of time refreshing pages that have no comment activity and changing/deleting bookmarks.

I hope I don't sound like I'm complaining about the site, because I'm not. I'm just wondering if there's something obvious I'm missing.**

*If I sub to a comment thread through bloglines, I get some number of most recent comments on that thread when I first subscribe, but the feed never updates. I haven't poked at it any more than that, because if I'm going to have to manually refresh the page, I'll just go to the individual posts directly. I'm also not convinced that I like RSS for comments because I can't scroll up to see the older comments.

**I do know about the "Most recent comments" sidebar and "Last **** comments" pages, but that long list of intermixed comments from different threads doesn't really work for me. I have trouble finding the oldest unread comment for all the threads I'm following, especially when our hosts have been prolific posters and we have many active threads, as we have recently.

#33, Steve C. -

Weren't there similar dust/soot sprites in My Neighbor Totoro too? (Yes, I know, it is the same writer/director.) Somehow I got the idea that they were a piece of Japanese mythology (is that the word I want?), rather like we think of "gremlins."

R M Koske, I check the site pretty regularly when I'm not at work (*blocking* it at work was the best thing to happen to my productivity in months) and click on the most recent comments of any thread-- not the oldest most recent comment, but the newest. Then I scroll up until I recognize something. It means I read some comments twice, but by the end of a long thread, I'm usually skimming anyway; the reread helps. It also lets me know where I last read the thread. I don't use RSS for anything-- I don't even have a Livejournal Friends page, partly out of stubbornness, partly because I like typing in each name as I want to read them.

In other news, fungus gnats are suppose to get *better* when you stop watering your plants, right? Grr.

Steve C @ 33... Ah yes. The episode's official title was It Crawled Out of the Woodwork, but I later found at a gathering of fans that we all call it the vacuum-cleaner creature episode. Which prompted one fan to make a joke about the brain-house episode, in which a young woman turns to dust at the end.

R.M. Koske @35 -

I believe you're right. My Neighbor Totoro is one of my favorite films - Miyazaki is a genius.

Serge @ 37 -

I'm going have to dig out my OL DVDs and watch that one again. Along with "The Zanti Misfits".

Steve C @ 38... Woodwork's SFX are primitive, especially by modern standards, but I can put myself in the frame-of-mind of the era, and so the whole is very evocative. I do the same thing with the Zanti Misfits, who are quite creepy when one goes beyond their silly appearance.

Shakespeare parody: because it was on TV recently:

NYM: But Bardolph, ho! Where is our Bardolph now? What, Bardolph! Speak!

FLUELLEN: He's gone. Certain, he is gone, there is not a sign of him; there is not a Bardolph anywhere, look you, he is complete vapour'd.

PISTOL: Let's ask the wench Elaine. Boy, do you practice your French tongue upon her.

NYM: An I would she would practice her French tongue upon me, Ancient Pistol.

BOY: Peace, good Nym. Alors, mademoiselle, savez vous ou est le monsieur Bardolph? Le soldat anglais avec le nez enrougi? Est-ce que quelqu'un l'a pris?

ELAINE: Ah, monsieur, le foret est devenu vif et l'a pris.

BOY: Why, sure, the woman's mad.

FALSTAFF: Gentle Boy, what says she?

BOY: The very forest, she said, did come to life, and take him.

NYM: Damnation to her!

FLUELLEN: I must confess to you now, good Sir John, that this is entirely outside the principles of war; for I have soldiered in the wars now twenty years, look you, and there is nothing in my experience to account for it; no, not in the wars of great Pompey, at all.

FALSTAFF: Good Fluellen, you do belie your name; for I have heard it said you have no fear of aught of woman born.

FLUELLEN: Why, Sir John, you are wrong, look you, and my name is not belied; for I do not believe that this is a thing of woman born.

JAMY: Look here! Where Bardolph sat!

PISTOL: A horrid mark of clotted blood!

FLUELLEN: It cannot be Bardolph's blood; for his face was ever as purple as the grape, and no wine of this colour was ever pressed from any grape, it is completely against nature.

NYM: Why, cullies, if it bleeds, we'll make it bleed again!

(All discharge pieces and exeunt shouting.)

Leah @#5: I also have a small LeSportSac bag (manufacturer website, in use), which I like a lot because it's extremely lightweight and reasonably weatherproof.

It's also bigger inside than it looks. In the front compartment I am currently carrying keys, a bundle of thumb-drive-type things, sunglasses, three pens, 1.5 sticks of lip balm, and a roll of antiacids. Middle: wallet, cell phone, PDA. Back: iPod, earphones. If I needed to, I could throw in a PDA portable keyboard, too.

Unfortunately because I have a poor memory for a lot of things I'm not sure how long I've had it. It seems pretty durable, though, in the details of its construction.

ALGERNON: It seems, then, that we are being pursued by some malicious creature.

CECIL: Surely that can be no novelty for a fashionable playwright.

ALGERNON: (ignoring him) It appears to be able to pass completely unnoticed --

CECIL: Would it not to be more accurate, in that case, to say that it does not appear at all? In any case, I was always under the impression, Algernon, that you regarded most of your critics as unworthy of notice.

ALGERNON: (angrily) Damn it, Cecil, Sir Roger has been abducted by this thing, and there you sit, calmly eating cucumber sandwiches!

CECIL: Well, one can't eat cucumber sandwiches in an agitated manner.

Jo@32: Ok, chalk one up for the Anachronisms-to-Avoid list. Altho I do note that Wikipedia says that playing cards were known in Europe slightly before the Gutenberg press and in China in the 12th century -- but as you said, they only really took off in Europe in the mid-to-late 15th century (i.e., after woodcut technology made them more affordable).

Subcutaneous fluids for cats:

If you need to do this, and you haven't already, please try warming the fluid before-hand (ten minutes with the bag in a sink otherwise full of hot water, keep the connector out of it on general principles). It made a big difference to our cat's acceptance of them.

Building or bricolaging a cargo-cult IV stand also helped, because it allowed us to comfortably do it anywhere she felt at home.

Selfish note: doing this for her made her dying a lot easier on me than was the case for cats for whom we couldn't do much beyond ending their suffering.

From email*, a paragraph that I simply cannot figure out how to begin to answer.

Why do you have to learn Dutch? There are now more mainland Chinese speaking English (Chinglish) than the entire population of North America, so why can't the Dutch learn it? Surely the E.U. will legislate for a common language eventually? Don't think for one moment that it will be Dutch!

Suggestions welcome.

-----

* Australian correspondent; the mutual interest is bookbinding.

abi @ 45... Chinglish?

45: I would suggest "...er, to speak to Dutch people with?" followed by a long stare.

abi: ajay's response is good, followed up with "because the immigrant is the one who should learn the majority language", "because I don't think that the disappearance of non-English languages is a good thing"*, and "because whether the EU picks a language or not (and whether it's English or not), right now most of the people I talk to speak Dutch".

*: Assuming you agree with either of those statements. :)

abi, how about "Because learning new languages is cool and fun; because I want to help keep the Dutch language from dying out entirely; because there are social advantages to speaking the language of the country one lives in, even if one can "get by" without doing so; and because I'm sick of Dutch people being able to talk over me without my understanding a word."

Any subset.

I'm still waiting for the Universal Translator to be developed.

R.M. Koske: I use brute force. I try to remind myself to click the terminal comment when I get to the bottom of a thread. When I come back I hit "last 1000" and scroll to the highlighted comments. I then look to see the first new comment above that in the threads I'm reading (usually all of them).

If I forget, then I go to my last comment, and move forward. That often means a lot of re-reading/skimming to find the place I stopped, but it's how I keep up.

abi: That was a real sentiment? The mind croggles. My answer would be, "Because I am living here and that's what they speak." If I were to me more in the tone of persuading, the answers would be; on a practical level, "Even if the EU decides to make a pan-european lingua franca, and it isn't Dutch, that does me little good now."

I don't understand the reference to Chinese at all, it's a bizarre non-sequitor/appeal to majority which baffles me (as I don't suspect she thinks Australia ought to start speaking Chinese because there will soon be so many of them; or somesuch).

Ow, just ow.

I haven't made it all the way through the clips yet, but I just wanted to thank you for posting the clip from Sister Act. That brought back a lot of good memories. (all mine, FWIW)

Abi @45

"because the local land use council meetings are conducted in Dutch, and if I can't attend the local council planning meeting and speak, our house will almost certainly get the picturesque stork nest, the smiling tourists, and, nine months of the year, a miasma of rotting fish"?

Steve C @ 50... Oui, oui... It still stings that ST-TNG's first episode indicated that by the 24th Century French will be a dead language. Then again that's the century where most Starfleet people don't seem to know who James T. Kirk was, which would seem to indicate a bit of a memory problem. (Must be Q's fault. Or maybe Trelayne's.)

Terry 51: I think the point was that if so many Chinese can learn English, why doesn't the much smaller population of Dutch speakers just bow to their wisdom and do the same? It's a pretty stupid point, but it's not a total non sequitur.

abi, am I right in thinking most Dutch people do, in fact, speak English these days? That's what's put the Irish language in danger of dying out entirely (as a native language, at any rate).

And I just want to say that "Hysterically angry motorist vs. Cheesebear" shows an astonishingly patient, even phlegmatic cop. I think the behavior of the motorist, of course, is utterly inexcusable even if everything he says is factually true.

I do wonder how that got taped. The quality of the sound from the motorist implies that the cop was wearing a mike.

#45: Maybe "because it's their home"?

49, 53: in other words "because I don't trust the Dutch*, and I want to be able to understand at least a few important phrases like 'look, the dike has given way, flee politely to the nearest high ground**', 'so, it's agreed, we start persecuting everyone who isn't blond and over six foot four tonight?' and 'hands up everyone who doesn't want a miasma of rotting fish around their house'".

* No insult to the Dutch intended, they all seem very nice.

**Belgium

ajay @ 58... Don't the Klingons say "Don't trust a Dutch bearing gifts" ?

Serge @ 50 -

I can see the scene...McCoy leaning over the French dictionary: "It's dead, Jim."

"Well, too bad...say, it's been two hours since I got laid, and I'm getting twitchy...any girls around?"

Serge @ 50 -

I can see the scene...McCoy leaning over the French dictionary: "It's dead, Jim."

"Well, too bad...say, it's been two hours since I got laid, and I'm getting twitchy...any girls around?"

#36, Diatryma - The LJ Friends page is a particularly kludgy implementation of RSS, IMO. I had trouble keeping up with it unless I kept the number of regularly posting friends down to >5.

For some reason having to type in (or even open from favorites) a site on a regular basis is something I find annoying. Things that are only mostly-good get culled out pretty quickly when I have to do it.

(Would it help with the gnats to pull out the vacuum and suck them up? I do that when we get a fruit-fly invasion, and it seems to help a little.)

#51, Terry Karney -

I managed to teach myself the habit of clicking on post-timestamps to make the page scroll instead of scrolling the regular way. So even if I forget to click on the terminal comment, I'm usually close when I look for the highlighted comments.

I'm suspecting variations on brute force are the usual method. But it was worth a try. :)

ajay --

Not so much "I don't trust" as "it's darn hard to participate in my local community when I can't speak the language"; the stork is intended as a humorous example of why you would care.

The "when the notice comes in the mail that the power will be off for four hours Tuesday morning" case is much more realistic, but perhaps not as funny.

abi, #45: The first thing that springs to my mind is --

"Because I want to communicate with the people around me NOW, not at some unspecified time in the indeterminate future."

Xopher, #56: Indeed. I keep wanting to hit some of the people in the "Goose-stepping" thread over the head with it, and wondered if that might have been part of the reason it was noted in the first place.

Many, many responses here I agree with. I am learning Dutch because everyone here speaks it, because the laws, contracts and customs that bind me are in Dutch*, because it's damned rude to come here and not speak it, because I like the language, etc, etc. There have even been instances where people have spoken about me in Dutch right in front of my face.

The problem is that there is so much to say that I am lost for a polite way to say it. It's like 10 people trying to go through a doorway at once—in the end no one gets through.

Xopher @55:

am I right in thinking most Dutch people do, in fact, speak English these days? That's what's put the Irish language in danger of dying out entirely (as a native language, at any rate).

Most Dutch people can speak English, to one degree or another. Even road construction workers can muster enough to give directions and explanations. But they don't speak it to each other†.

Gaelic stopped being everyone's native language in Ireland - native Irish households would have English as the home language. Here in the Netherlands, however, it's only funny foreign families like ours that have a household language that's not local.

-----

* You can take the driving theory test in English here, for instance, but the laws that the courts interpret and enforce are the Dutch ones, not the English translations.

† Except for swearing. English swear words like "shit" are considered innocuous enough for even older children to use.

#65, abi -

It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that non-local curses are considered to be mild in a way that has nothing to do with their heat in their native homes. Which is annoying because I always find myself tempted to add them to my vocabulary.

Abi:

The only possible (maybe polite) answer is, "Why *wouldn't* I learn Dutch? I already speak X other languages ..."

Michael Turyn @1: [..] a world where no-one can individually discriminate between dreamt and real events.

Think of the legal system....

Not quite the same thing, but in medieval Europe dream evidence was accepted in the witchcraft trials; i.e., "I dreamt I saw so-and-so meeting with the Devil" was accepted in the courts as evidence that so-and-so had in fact met with the Devil.

abi,

I'm going to be impertinent: do you know if your Australian correspondent has a)ever traveled to a country where s/he didn't speak the language or b)had any dealings with non-English speakers in his/her community?

abi 65: There are still places where Irish is the home language. As of a couple of decades ago there were still people who spoke Irish but not English.

These are, of course, the poorest parts of Ireland.

Btw, there are several different Gaelics (Irish, Scots, Manx, Northumberland, others), and they're mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Since you've lived in Scotland, I'll take your word that they just call their non-English language "Gaelic" there, but I have it on good authority that the Irish call their Gaelic "Irish"--when speaking English.

abi @ 45

Having picked my jaw up off the floor...

I'm amazed. Yes, English is commonly the default language, particularly in Europe for mixed-country gatherings, but you're living in the Netherlands. Speaking Dutch will make all sorts of things in everyday life easier (reading signs, understanding labels, taking part in numerous little transactions, jokes etc..

Ever year when I go to the European conference for zoo/wildlife veterinarians, I am humbled by all the people around me who are presenting papers in English, and conversing with me in English. I am very aware of the number of groups of vets from other countries who speak several languages and politely switch to English when I join them, because this poor Englishwoman cannot manage enough of any other language to hold a conversation in it (I have managed a semi-French conversation on rare occasions, so long as I could answer in mostly English).

Ronit @69::

do you know if your Australian correspondent has a)ever traveled to a country where s/he didn't speak the language or b)had any dealings with non-English speakers in his/her community

I do not know; we converse intermittently on the challenges of being a self-taught hobby bookbinder, with only the most peripheral information about our lives.

I would suspect from the tone about the Chinese that he has encountered Chinese immigrants to Australia and not been impressed. But because we generally do not get into peripheral matters, I can't really see how to address how very strange I find his comments.

I'm casting around for some way to tell him that he's got no clue whatever about the realities of European life without either ranting or foaming at the mouth. Because I am a little tempted to do one, or both, of those things.

You see, it is almost possible to live here without learning Dutch. It's possible enough that it drives me nuts that people suggest it, in the way that a suggestion that we all switch to Basque does not.

abi #45: Yeah, it sure seems like it would be hard to really consider someplace home if you didn't speak the native language, even if most everyone could speak yours. Besides, there's something really cool about understanding foreign language conversations around you, especially when the speakers don't think you will be able to.

I have a Dutch friend whose American wife learned Dutch while living there, and she said it was fairly hard learning to speak it, because people would often hear her American English accent and switch to English.

Serge, #46: Don't know what it means to an Australian, but in Hong Kong, "Chinglish" is the word used -- mostly by Chinese with good English -- to ridicule errors caused by using English vocabulary but Chinese grammar.

In the theater of memory

Every play is an improv,

Stored bits remade from

Piles of scattered stuff --

Yet the taste of the first kiss

Remains so real.

albatross #73: people would often hear her American English accent and switch to English

From the "How Others Hear Us" department, that brings to mind an old Benny Hill skit where he would be dressed in American tourist couture and speak using his impression of a standard American accent. Funny but odd.

Malthus #19:

Another nice book on medieval memory (and its classical antecedents) is Mary Carruthers' The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. It doesn't just do memory palaces, but also looks into the connections between memory and narrative.

I tried very hard, when living in Venice, to stick totally to Italian. This was made much easier by the fact that I was staying in a relatively non-touristed area, and that tourists generally have no need to get replacement pot handles at the ironmongers. Result, I made some friends (or at least friendly acquaintances), such as the 80-year-old lady at the dentist (she practiced her English and I practiced my Italian). The dentist himself only spoke Italian, so I had to mug up on vocabulary before even making the appointment. The weirdest conversation, though, was at the ironmongers; the proprietor, convinced that I was Inglese rather than Americana, insisted on discussing, in great detail, the (then-big-news) rift between Prince Charles and Diana. However, I think my graduation exercise must have been deciphering the manual for the programmable thermostat; this was much more difficult than taking notes on a fifteenth-century diary.

(It only now occurs to me to wonder if the thermostat manual was the Italian equivalent of those electronics manuals whose English versions appear to have been produced by Google Translate.)

Xopher @70:

Re Irish/Gaelic

Interesting. In Scotland, Scots Gaelic (pronounced "Gal-lic") is generally discussed in contrast with Gaelic (pronounced "Gay-lic"), which is the Irish language. I shall note the Irish usage for the future.

abi -- hey, maybe everyone learning Basque is actually the answer. It would be a great leveler. (Oh, wait. Then we'd have the factions for Rumantsch, Sorbian, and what-all fighting for primacy, like scrapping siblings.)

But I do sympathize, both with the necessity of learning the local language and impatience with the "but English is everywhere, why bother?" mentality. And teaching ESL, I've come to realize that for a lot of Europeans, English is something that they learned at school, maybe 20 years ago, and haven't necessarily had to use again. So just blithely expecting that *everyone* speaks and understands English is ... unrealistic. Just like expecting me to use the French I learned in college. Oy.

albatross @73:

I have a Dutch friend whose American wife learned Dutch while living there, and she said it was fairly hard learning to speak it, because people would often hear her American English accent and switch to English.

It's a real challenge. But I've found that if I reply to the English comment in Dutch, I can often drag the conversation back into Dutch.

One day I was at the post office trying to mail a parcel, and was making a real hash of things. I apologised to the woman behind the counter for my bad Dutch. And the guy behind me, clearly keen to get his business done, asked what my first language was.

"English," I replied.

"She speaks English," he said (in Dutch)

"I know," I said, still in Dutch, "but I need to practice."

And the two of them bestowed on me a matched pair of delighted smiles. He stepped back, and she and I made it through the transaction in Dutch.

My current strategy for practicing is to only IM my Dutch colleagues in Dutch (our office runs about half on Skype chat rather than actual talking to one another). I had to give that up this afternoon, when I was frustrated for other reasons and hadn't the patience to try to convey what I needed to say in my clunky Dutch. But I do try to do it all in Dutch.

Tony Zbaraschuk @75:

Excellent.

I'm just glad nobody expects me to use the COBOL I learned in college any more. heh.

joann @67:

"Why *wouldn't* I learn Dutch? I already speak X other languages ..."

Well, though, there's the problem. Dutch is the fifth language* I've studied, but let's look closely at the list, shall we?

1. English, in which I am reasonably fluent.

2. Spanish, in which I can pretty well get along as long as we're talking in the present tense. My high water mark there was 8 days in a hospital where no one spoke English, but that was 17 years ago.

3. Latin, which is not taught as a spoken language. I can compose things in Latin, or translate into it, but not quickly.

4. Classical Greek, a language I never loved and have forgotten almost entirely

I have never achieved what I would consider adequate fluency in another language than English. Something in me secretly doubts that I can. That's hard to fight against, harder than any other obstacle.

----

* by which I mean natural language; we glide over my fluency or lack thereof in BASIC, Pascal, C++, ML, COBOL, REXX, and C#

Stories of Memory

All agree that Euphemia has been inhabited since ancient times, but many are the arguments over how it has grown, and which neighborhoods began first or have grown the most. There are some who tell the tale of an English poet who spoke a couplet, ten iambic feet*, that crawled out upon the bare ground, sat for a moment, and began to unpack itself into a new and shining neighborhood of homes and shops and bustling crowds. They say if you walk to the edge of town, you can find it unpacking still.

The sages of Euphemia are quick to point out that the city is the center of all that is or could be imagined, for memory is a fragile and mutable thing, often transforming and rearranging itself into new shapes. Certain it is that one can look out from the battlements of the city's towers and see memories of the past, or look through the grilles in the walls of the crypts under the city and see future memories. More than this, those who know the city best will tell you of places where you may gaze into what might have been, or scry what can never be.

* "Remembrance and reflection, how allied,
   what thin partitions, sense from thought divide."
     - Alexander Pope: Essay on Man

Earl Cooley III: I have a Thai freind, who was in Japan with Americans who spoke brilliant Japanese. He could get by (with, as usual better comprehension than speech). So when someone spoke japanese, the Americans tended to answer.

Once the response was, "Oh, look, your monkeys can speak", to which he put on his thickest Indian accent and say, in English, "Yes, they can, isn't it wonderful?"

He said the faces slamming shut when they realised he wasn't japanese was wonderful.

re speaking the local language: When I go to Ukraine I don't speak the local language, but rather Russian. Because I am plainly not Russian (even with a decent accent, my stresses are so-so and my grammar has gaping wounds where English is too solidly part of how I parse things), they cut me slack.

I do try to use Ukrianian versions of polite noises (though one has to be careful, a sloppy rendition of thank you can sound terribly offensive, sounding something like "prick"), and that helps, but my greatest trump card is apologising for only having taken russian for one year.

Never mind that it was a year where I was in class, studying Russian, 40 hours a week, plus homework, study and living with 160 people all doing the same; I leave that out.

When they hear that, they think me an incredible speaker of russian, and I get even more slack.

You do realise, all of you, that the storytellers of Euphemia are often hanged as counterfeiters?

RM #34: I do something like brute force. Because I comment way too much, I tend to do a backward search for "albatross," and then skip ahead until I start seeing unfamiliar posts.

You can always do the "distinguished points" trick. Choose some high volume poster whose posts you remember, and then search backward for their name until you get to the last post of theirs you've read. That gets you passably close to the end of what you've read.

I've heard a couple of people complain that ML is too hard to read because of the volume of the comment threads and the lack of sub-threading within these threads. IMO, it is high volume, but dividing up the subthreads would lose a lot of what makes it wonderful.

albatross @88:

Because I comment way too much

You comment somewhere between not quite frequently enough and just the right amount.

Terry @ #86, was your Russian study at the Post-Grad school in Monterey?

I spent 5 hours a week learning Russian in both my junior and senior years in high school, but it's mostly long gone. I can still read and verbalize what I read, but I don't necessarily understand it.

Being Open-thready:

Sticking my favorite Pope couplet on that last post made me think about the concept of "golden lines", the lines of a work or an author that stand out above the lines they're with. The classic example is

    a rose-red city - "Half as old as Time!"

    That hour, O master, shall be bright for thee;


    Thy merchants chase the morning down to the sea,

What are your favorites?

I've had to get by in Estonia with Russian (as Terry said of Ukraine, being obviously not Russian helps), and in Hungary with German. I can say "I don't understand" and "thank you" in Hungarian, and little else aside from song lyrics. I don't know any Estonian at all.

I try and use German when I'm in German-speaking countries and Dutch when I'm in the Netherlands, except when I'm socialising or dealing with accommodations. It's far more exciting than it should be when a Dutch person actually responds in Dutch; I don't have the same problem of being answered in English when I'm in Vienna. This could be in part because I have actually studied German (even if only for six months), and have only picked Dutch up sort of randomly. Also, German's far easier to pronounce. :) (I consider myself lucky to finally be able to more often than not hear the difference between -ee- and -ij- in Dutch; reproducing the latter is another story. Not to mention -ui-.)

Of course, then I have to hope I actually understood the reply....

It was also fun when I was studying in St Petersburg and had been there long enough for the lady at the AmEx office who was keeper of the incoming mail to start complaining to me about the clueless American tourist who'd been ahead of me in line, in Russian. Getting randomly harangued in Russian, along with a young Russian girl, by a babushka at a bus stop was another highlight.

How do I keep up?

I don't, haven't since February, too many things to do outside, behind on everything online and in the house. Only here the last couple of days because I've got a head cold where all the symptoms are dialed up to eleven.

abi,

Except for swearing. English swear words like "shit" are considered innocuous enough for even older children to use.

ha, same with english swearwords in hebrew. i was very taken aback my first year, when an ultra-orthodox woman, with whom i was slightly acquainted & whose baby i was holding, asked me "did he make shit?"

swearing in arabic, on the other hand, is double swearing. as hebrew is a recently resurrected language (& resurrected by goody-two-shoes marxists) there are very few good swear words in hebrew itself.

on people switching to english when they hear your accent,

yeah, barreling on in my grating hebrew usually worked for me. after living there four years, my accent got so good people asked if i was french, or russian.

on easily mispronounced phrases you're better off not trying on natives (re terry),

my sister-in-law is russian, so my brother gets her to teach him russian phrases to use with her relatives. they gave up on "where are you going?" because he could only say, "where are you, idiot?"

I read ML by clicking on the "See last 1000 comments" link and scrolling down to the last one I've already clicked on. I open the first one after that in a new tab and read the thread from there on, then close the tab and scroll up the list until I get to a different thread, then open that one in a new tab and read to the end. I repeat until I'm done, and then click the very top comment to hold my place until I come back.

abi @72 & 81:

I would suspect from the tone about the Chinese that he has encountered Chinese immigrants to Australia and not been impressed. That sort of linguistic entitlement and cluelessness comes from somewhere.

It must be very strange indeed, with all the effort you're putting into achieving fluency, to hear this nonsense from your correspondent.

In the spirit of open threadery, and in honour of the Republican party standard-bearer's latest contribution to economic theory:

Prices are rising, driving us all mad,

we all agree that no one can relax;

this is the worst condition, things are bad,

and we can't bear up under these attacks.

McCain says "Cheer up, every lass and lad,

don't shiver in the face of these small cracks!

There is no reason for you to be sad.

We'll just remit some eighteen cents of tax!"

No one could doubt that someone would be glad

to send old John an email or a fax,

explaining just exactly how to add

some more gravitas to his ancient tracks.

For while we suffer he still has to pad

around selling ideas taken from mouldy sacks

and smelling rather worse than day-old shad:

"We'll just remit some eighteen cents of tax!"

Linkmeister: Not at the NPG (Naval Post Grad) but DLI-FLC (Defense Language Institute, Foreign Language Center: yes, I've been institutionalised).

They are a few miles from each other.

albatross: I didn't say that I used my name to find things, in part because I am so frequent a commenter. I've learned better than to say things like, "I post too much".

I don't, for one, think you post too often.

Then again, I don't, really, think anyone here posts too often. I do think threading would be the death of much of what I value here.

I'm not keeping up with ML well just now, but my technique works all right when I have the time. I keep a tab open on any thread I"m actively following, and when I have time I go to a tab and reload it, go to the bottom, then scan back up for posts I've already read. This works as long as I don't have so many open tabs that I forget to check some of them, and fall so far behind I either have to skim through or abandon the thread.

I tried using GoogleReader to watch RSS for individual threads, but two things defeated me: the lag between posting and seeing the post in the reader, and the fact that I couldn't get the Reader to keep the posts in numerical order, totally confusing me as to what I had read and what I hadn't.

abi #65: In Dutch-speaking (Batavophone?) countries English swearing may have a touch of exoticism. I'm still puzzled by a English-language graffito I saw in an alleyway off the Domineestraat in Paramaribo "yrg gur cbyvpr shpx gurz nyy". Since Surinam is a Dutch-speaking country this was rather odd.

albatross @ 73:

I have a Dutch friend whose American wife learned Dutch while living there, and she said it was fairly hard learning to speak it, because people would often hear her American English accent and switch to English.

I know several non-Dutch astronomers who had two or three-year postdoctoral postiions in the Netherlands, and they've said the same thing.

(Dutch astronomers are almost invariably the most fluent non-native English speakers and writers in the astronomical community. I'm told this is partly because much of the Netherlands has historically been able to receive British TV broadcasts, and even the Dutch channels apparently broadcast foreign television shows with Dutch subtitles, rather than dubbing them.[*])

[*] Although even dubbing television programs into the local language is preferable to the approach taken by Polish TV: turn the original soundtrack way, way down and have one person read all the parts from a translated screenplay.

Mirian Beetle @94 -

ha, same with english swearwords in hebrew. i was very taken aback my first year, when an ultra-orthodox woman, with whom i was slightly acquainted & whose baby i was holding, asked me "did he make shit?"

Okay, that's the funniest thing I've read today.

Peter Erwin @101:

even the Dutch channels apparently broadcast foreign television shows with Dutch subtitles, rather than dubbing them.

Apart from children's TV, this is pretty well universally true. It's also the case for films, again except for kids' films. (Kids aren't expected to know English yet.) My colleagues also cite this as a reason that their English doesn't get rusty even when I'm not about.

My fellow student of Dutch in the office says he learned the word for body (het lichaam) by watching CSI and reading the subtitles.

I had a great time one night in Germany watching an American movie, in English, with German subtitles. It's how I first learned the word 'verfolgen' (from the title of the movie) and that 'spiel' is "play" but also "game."

The only Dutch I have is "I'm sorry I don't speak Dutch" - and I've never had to use it. I've only ever encountered one person in Holland who couldn't get by in English - and she spoke German as well as Dutch.

Interestingly, although I can't speak Dutch, I can read it - or at least, make sense of most things - simply by reading it aloud in German and listening to myself in English (if you see what I mean).

Two memories of my last trip to Amsterdam:

Watching the checkout girl in the local corner shop as she spoke to customers in front of me in the queue - Dutch, German, French and then English. She spoke four languages and was working a till - in England they'd make you a cabinet minister if you could do that.

And standing by a canal with a street map out, trying to work out just which bridge over which canal it was. A chap cycled past, glanced at me and immediately hopped off his bike, strolled over and said "Good morning, are you lost, can I help?" I can't think of any other capital city where the first passer-by would offer help. (I'll give him a pass on automatically assuming that a clueless tourist must be English)

Interchangable memories? What a weird concept. After a while you will forget who you are. Or someone else will.

Terry @98, I just wondered because we briefly lived in Monterey while Dad attended the NPG school (not for languages, though).

When we lived there I attended a school at the top of a hill. At the bottom of that hill was my house. It was a long (mile, maybe? I was 8) bike ride around and up to get to school, but the ride home was about 5 seconds of absolute exhilaration.

Bruce at 91: may we just share lines, couplets, and verses we love?

He's not in fashion, but this verse of Swinburne's still takes my breath away.

For winter's rains and ruins are over,

And all the season of snows and sins;

The days dividing lover and lover,

The light that loses, the night that wins;

And time remembered is grief forgotten,

And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,

And in green underwood and cover

Blossom by blossom the spring begins.

And also, from Robert Bly:

I am a man in love with the setting stars.

Since this thread has fairly few comments on it so far, here is my start of a Making Light song, sorry I couldn't write the whole thing.

(to the tune of Model of a Modern Major General)

I seek illumination from the writers on the fluorosphere.

Each time I look at Making Light I see that even more is here.

Politics and parodies and poems mean a lot to me

as well as all the minor lore of dinosaurs and sodomy.

Chorus:

As well as all the minor lore of dinosaurs and sodomy.

(I envision the chorus singing some lines disemvowelled and some lines in ROT 13, but rhyming with lines that aren't.)

Sylvia Li @ 74... Thanks for the clarification. Mind you, in all the years I've been around the Bay Area or dealing with its denizens, I have never met any immigrant from Asia(*) who didn't have a better grasp of English grammar than Dubya has. All right, that is setting the bar pretty low.

(*) Or from anywhere else for that matter. I see one from Québec in the mirror every day.

Swinburne has some really incredible lines, like Prosperine

holding all things mortal

In her cold immortal hands

but I've never really been able to read them for mre than just individual lines.

I studied French for several years in school but never got up to full conversational fluency (and it doesn't help that it was a completely different dialect from the one spoken a day's drive from here). As is usual with people who learn languages in school, my reading comprehension is much better than my aural comprehension. When I see French-language movies, I often wish that they had French subtitles instead of English ones; it would make it much easier for me to parse the spoken language, because I wouldn't be context-switching in every sentence, and probably help me keep up the skills I have.

I've heard that people trying to learn the language of the country they've moved to often use closed captions for the deaf when watching TV, for the same purpose.

Peter Erwin @101 says the Dutch are good at English: I'm told this is partly because much of the Netherlands has historically been able to receive British TV broadcasts, and even the Dutch channels apparently broadcast foreign television shows with Dutch subtitles, rather than dubbing them.

This is the approach taken in the Scandinavian countries too. It comes from olden days of cinema: in smaller markets like Scandinavia or the Netherlands overdubs would be too expensive, so they'd take the cheaper solution of keeping the original sound and adding local language subtitles. We wouldn't want it any other way now, of course; overdubs are for kids, and small kids at that.

Around these parts, Norwegian State Broadcasting has a radio news channel that gets a lot of material from the BBC - they'll send English-language news items untranslated in the regular broadcasts, and the occasional whole programme. And at night they just relay the BBC World Service.

Andy Brazil @ 105: The only Dutch I have is "I'm sorry I don't speak Dutch"

I don't speak English

Erik 106: Interchangable memories? What a weird concept. After a while you will forget who you are. Or someone else will.

It's worse than that. After a while you will stop being who you are.

Matt 112: I use closed captions every day, at home, in my native language. I don't learn anything from it except what the people on the screen are saying, which I can't otherwise figure out. :-)

Subtitle story: Back in the days of laserdisks (and pricey ones at that) a friend was looking in a catalog and found one for Das Boot, with subtitles.

He snapped it up.

When it arrived, it was Das Boot, it was subtitled, the subtitles were in Japanese.

What I found disturbing about seeing Das Boot dubbed was how the speech seemed to be English, for the lips; and then it would suddenly be all wrong.

Matt McIrvin @112: I've heard that people trying to learn the language of the country they've moved to often use closed captions for the deaf when watching TV, for the same purpose.

I like to have English subtitles when watching English-language stuff on DVD - It means I don't have to catch every single syllable of dialogue, but I also don't have to read a lame translation.

Terry Karney @116:

You might enjoy this bit of trivia: Das Boot is actually dubbed in the original language. According to the commentary track on the 3 1/2 hour director's cut DVD, there was too much noise on the set for sound to get recorded cleanly, so they redid the dialogue afterwards. As they pointed out, Germans are good at overdubs...

abi and Terry: Thanks for the kind comments.

Roy #117: I do that with Spanish language TV sometimes; it's especially helpful if many people are talking at once

R. M. Koske @34:

I noticed the same problem with the RSS comments feed in NetNewsWire. My workaround is to keep the comments open in a tab; once I catch up I open the last comment in another tab, then close the original. When next I read I can hit reload, then read forward in the tab. (I don't have a problem with too many tabs because stuff that I want to keep around gets moved to Safari; thus tabs in NNW are either things I haven't read yet or ML comment threads.)

Roy G. Ovrebo @ 117

Many movies are at least partly postdubbed these days; it's a result of the fact that many movies are made at least partly on location, where background sound, wind, etc. are very hard to either control or remove from the audio recording.

Anyone ever been to Constantinople?

It's a stop on a cruise we're considering. (The cruise we've been trying to put together for a couple years now. still haven't booked it.) I thought it might be interesting, historically. But someone we know who'd been there said they got their face slapped for not having their arms covered up.



I spent some time in Israel for work, which was a bit of a stress, not a lot, but a bit. Having my coworker drive me around for lunch and then point out all the places a suicide bomber had blown themselves up, was, odd. But I didn't freak and fly out of the country. But I don't know if I really want that sort of mentality for what is supposed to be a vacation.



Maybe I'll just stay on the boat that day.

Greg...Istanbul was Constantinople, now it's Istanbul not Constantinople. Been a long time gone, Constantinople, now it's Turkish delight on a moonlit night.

I don't think any of us are old enough to have been to Constantinople.

I have a friend (in Tel Aviv right now) whom I think has been to Istanbul. I ask. I'd love to go to the spice market there.

@Abi, in general--why do you feel the need to respond to this question at all? The questioner is obviously not a language learner, nor a cultural explorer, and so probably will never understand.

My family has never understood why I needed to learn German, Italian, Russian, Japanese etc.*

Language learning, to those who try it and those who love it, is often an end in itself. Practical considerations of daily life aside, it's an excellent way to keep your brain all happy and fed.

@122 Xopher

Damn you, that is going to be in my head for WEEKS.

*Actually, they might understand a bit of why I need to learn Japanese, as my wife's English isn't so hot yet.

And it's been even longer since visiting Byzantium, except in imagined memories.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Jim 124: @Abi, in general--why do you feel the need to respond to this question at all?

Good point. abi could just go ahead and write to hir as she has before, with no mention of it. It might have been a joke, one of those that doesn't come off without the proper tone, which doesn't come across in writing.

Damn you, that is going to be in my head for WEEKS.

Hey, there are worse things to have in your head.

Xopher, #122: Why'd Constantinople get the works? That's nobody's business but the Turks'!

Years before it became a stew of racism and xenophobia, the National Lampoon used to parody xenophobia and conspiracy theory by occasionally running articles on the "Dutch Menace" ready to grind us beneath its wooden heel.

Now that I think of it, "Dutch Menace" is probably the name of a strain available from Mark Emery Seeds....

Has everyone noticed that Fafblog is back? Go Giblets!! Yeah team!!!

Skipping ahead here: I keep a tab for each thread I follow as well, but as I leave a thread, I click on the date header of the last message I read in that thread, then place the bookmark.

When I return, I click on the bookmark and I'm back where I was.

It's easy enough in Safari to clean up the duplicate bookmarks; not sure about other browsers.

Skipping ahead here: I keep a tab for each thread I follow as well, but as I leave a thread, I click on the date header of the last message I read in that thread, then place the bookmark.

When I return, I click on the bookmark and I'm back where I was.

It's easy enough in Safari to clean up the duplicate bookmarks; not sure about other browsers.

Double post.

Double post.

Apologetic commentary on double post, noting clumsy fingers, slow internet, and nearby dinosaur sodomy as mitigating factors.

On languages: I think every group of friends must have a linguist or general language nerd and a geologist or general rock nerd. My favorite groups of friends include both, though in some cases both of them are me. Now that I've noticed that, it makes a little more sense how many conversations turn to words or rocks... or, because it's me, incredible feats of biology nerd.

I was both aware of my awkwardness and very proud of it when a Chinese labmate asked if there was a word for the green stem on a poplar tree cutting-- the herbaceous vs the woody part, more or less, a way to differentiate what she was sampling. Twenty minutes, two paper towels of diagrams, and an explanation of vascular cambium later, I answered her simple vocabulary question.

Diatryama: I tend to be the language geek, rock geek (though Maia is the one who took geology, I'm the one who really likes it), plant geek, and food pornographer.

As bits of nerdery go, those are at least as entertaining as my facination with weaponry and things which go whooosh! and boom.

R.M. Koske, #34, I use old-fashioned means. I keep a piece of paper on the desk with the names of active posts and I check each one, finding the spot I last read and reading down from there. When a post hasn't had comments for two days, I mark it inactive (cross it off) and when new posts appear, I add them. I realize that a post could become really active again after two days, but I have to limit it somewhere and that works for me.

Tony, #75, great!

Matt @112

Latin American cable TV (mostly US TV with spanish subtitles) did wonders for my Spanish. Doesn't help with pronunciation, but it's great for learning how to reduce what you want to say to its simplest foreign form (either Spanish has a really small vocab, or they just use a tiny subset for subtitling, I've never figured out which).

Greg @ 121:

Wonderful place*. Get off the boat. Nothing like the pervasive paranoia** you get in Israel, but a fascinating mixture of east & west with more history than you can shake a stick at. Pretty heavily touristed though.

Do your best to be at the Blue Mosque when the call to prayer goes off in the evening (at about a million dB). The noise scares all the roosting birds off the roof and they circle the minarets in the uplighting. I'm not Muslim (or even religious) but I've never felt closer to God than when drowning in a wall of sound in the courtyard of that building.

But yes, covering skin is, at a minimum, polite***, though hair covering and the full-on overcoat isn't necessary. They're pretty cosmopolitan by middle eastern standards, but it's still a muslim country, and some of the older folk blame westerners for everything that's wrong with "the yoof of today" (see ***).

* Istanbul that is. Can't speak for Constantinople, but if you've found a cruise line that goes there can I have their details? A passenger liner seems like such an irresistably right way to time travel

**except it's not paranoia when they are out to get you

***spray on clothes, on the other hand, seem perfectly acceptable, for the local girls at least.

Diatryma @ 133 on groups of friends:

Yes, but it'd be nice if every group of friends included some people of practical use too. Need a micropaleontologist? No problem. Molecular biologist? I can find you three or four. Plumber? Forget it.

Distraxi: Simple plumbing (repair/replace the disposal, swap out washers, faucets, toilets, replace the line from the main to the house) I can do.

A new shower, not so much.

I make a tolerable handyman (and give me a mill, a lathe and a foundry, and I'm more than tolerable. I wish I was better at forging).

Istanbul was Constantinople, now it's Istanbul not Constantinople.

As God as my witness, I thought Turkey could fly.

Greg: And the fish suit.

Terry @ 138

I used to live in a proper house with a proper garage and workspace, and work somewhere that gave me access to a proper machine shop.

Now I live in an apartment and work somewhere where touching the tools if you're not a technician will get you shot.

I hadn't realized how much DIY I did until I couldn't.

Having said that, I've always hated plumbing, and having an excuse not to hunker upside down under the sink is nice. Be even nicer if I didn't have to PAY the guy who does it for me, is all....

Roy G. Ovrebo @ 113:

This is the approach taken in the Scandinavian countries too. It comes from olden days of cinema: in smaller markets like Scandinavia or the Netherlands overdubs would be too expensive, so they'd take the cheaper solution of keeping the original sound and adding local language subtitles.

I've read that dubbing of foreign movies was originally mandated by the government in both Italy (under Mussolini) and Spain (under Franco), in part to more effectively censor potentially disturbing content.[*] (It wouldn't surprise me if this were true of Germany as well.)

[*] On at least one occasion, a pair of adulterous lovers (in the movie Mogambo) were turned into brother and sister by the Spanish dubbing!

Xopher @104 -- I had a great time one night in Germany watching an American movie, in English, with German subtitles. It's how I first learned the word 'verfolgen' (from the title of the movie) and that 'spiel' is "play" but also "game."

I'll see your English and German and raise you French. Once I was in Basel for a conference and decided to go to a movie. "Good Morning, Vietnam" -- in English with German AND French subtitles.

re: dubbing. Germany has a large enough market (80+ million) to make dubbing affordable. Unfortunately they don't seem to be able to afford a different sychronizer for each actor. Thus we are constantly saying, "Hey, that's Teal'C!" or Dr. House, or whoever -- a small number of people dub a large number of actors.

My method of keeping up is almost identical to that of ethan@95 -- two points of difference:

1) I don't open the threads in tabs, I just click on the link to the post and then when I'm done with the thread I click the "back" button. [*]

2) When I'm done for the night, I click on the links to the last three posts, not just one. This makes it easier to find my place when I'm starting to read, the next night.

[*] For some reason tabbed browsing has never appealed to me. When I want to follow a link without losing my current place, I do a new window rather than a new tab. (And use Apple's Exposé to get around when things get cluttered.) This does mean that when I post, I have to go back to the comments list by hand, as the back button no longer works. I might start doing the threads in new windows, then closing the window when I'm done with the thread....

abi@84: You've read Homer, but don't love Ancient Greek? I wouldn't have thought it possible. Sigh.

Here's my list of languages:

1) English, of course.

2) French, a reasonable reading knowledge (although somewhat lacking in vocabulary) but not conversational fluency. I think I could become fluent if I lived somewhere where I could immerse myself.

3) Ancient Greek, which I don't converse in but read at least a little bit every day.

4) Classical Latin, in which my level is somewhat below abi's.

5) German, two semesters of college classes, twenty years ago, which is enough to help a bit when playing board games on line...a smattering.

6) Japanese, two semesters ditto, which is not even a smattering.

Old English goes on the list in a couple of months.

Debbie @ 143:

Unfortunately they don't seem to be able to afford a different sychronizer for each actor. Thus we are constantly saying, "Hey, that's Teal'C!" or Dr. House, or whoever -- a small number of people dub a large number of actors.

I think that's generic for dubbing markets, particularly since good dubbing requires some skill at making the dubbed dialog seem to match the timing of the original actor's lip movements.[*] The same thing holds true in Spain, for example, where a single voice actor dubs both Clint Eastwood and Darth Vader.

[*] We're not talking about the classically bad sort of dubbing applied to, e.g., Hong Kong movies on American TV in the 1970s.

Xopher @ 104:

Some German channels do show foreign films with subtitles, at least on occasion. But the vast majority of foreign films and TV series are dubbed, unfortunately.

Matt McIrvin @ 112... When I see French-language movies, I often wish that they had French subtitles instead of English ones

Meanwhile, French movies with subtitles in English are a weird experience for me because, even though French is my native language(*), my attention is always drawn to the words at the bottom of the screen. And it's interesting when the spoken words and the translation don't quite match.

(*) I started learning English in my later years in primary school, and practiced most of it watching Bugs Bunny cartoons.

Debbie @ 143... I'll see your English and German and raise you French

...must... speak... Frennnnnnnch...

Peter Erwin @ 146:

I remember being told that when a Harry Potter movie was dubbed into Norwegian for the local DVD release (the cinematic release was original sound with subtitles, but an extra soundtrack was made for the DVD, in order to reach the younger kids) that they took care to choose Norwegian phrases that matched the English words as closely as possible as to the length and even lip movements. This sometimes meant choosing or even making up Norwegian phrases that were not quite what a native speaker would have said in that context.

I'm not a fan of dubbing in general, but some German TV dubbing is surprisingly good at being non-intrusive. In the nineties I discovered that we had a few German channels on cable, and that some American shows that I did not otherwise have access to ran on those channels, one example being Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I would have preferred the English original, and not just because I'm better at English than I'm at German, but it was watchable.

The one kind of dubbing that I really have trouble with, is the Russian one, where one person reads all the lines and generally acts more as a narrator than a dubber. Not the least because they do not remove the original sound, just turn it down.

Per

Peter Erwin, 143 -- no doubt you're right about the dubbing market. As far as English-language programming goes, the pay-TV network in Germany (Premiere) broadcasts many if not all of their foreign language programs in both German and the original language. Of course, that usually means English, but Pan's Labyrinth was viewable in both German and Spanish.

Serge @147 -- I've noticed that the quality of animation has increased dramatically since ye olde afternoone cartoone days. (Yeah, duh.) But this is indeed noticeable with speech. I tend to subconsciously lipread dubbed shows anyway, to find out what is 'really' being said, and darned if I haven't recognized original English lip movements in animated characters.

As far as French goes, if you're trying to hypnotize me in an effort to pull out my three years of instruction from the recesses of my addled brain, more power to you! Wish it were that easy.

Debbie @ 150... darned if I haven't recognized original English lip movements in animated characters

Clutch Cargo, anybody?

Oh, by the way, I wasn't trying to hypnotize you. That's Bruce Cohen's thing. Since you had mentionned raising the French, I immediately thought of zombies. Coming soon, Charles Boyer, maître des zombies...

There is a debate going on here in Norway (and probably in the Netherlands as well) about what will happen with our national languages - and other smaller European languages - eventually. Will they be supplanted by English, or will we - either in a transitory period or even the end result - have a future situation where English is the "serious" language (some large Norwegian companies have already decided that their official language is English, for use even when Norwegian speakers send e-mail to other Norwegian speakers) for business etc., and Norwegian is just a "home language" for a segment of the population, or even the language of a "linguistic underclass".

There is also a tendency that Norwegians more and more tend to spurn knowledge of foreign languages other than English. English is mandatory in schools, and most students choose either German or French (some have the possibility to choose Spanish or Russian, according to what the shool offers) later on. But since Germans nowadays often start a conversation or e-mail correspondence with a Norwegian in English, it is often more easy to continue using English than to signal that you have a bit of German.

On the other hand, the world is not quite that awash in English that we in Western Europe sometimes assume. At my job there is still a demand for someone willing to speak German (not so much to native German speakers as to persons from the Balkans and other parts of Eastern Europe, and some nations in Asia as well), so there are still some parts of the world where other foreign languages besides English are held to be important.

P.C.

Roy G Ovrebo @ 117:

I also use the English subtitles (when available) on DVDs. For the reasons that you mention, and because I do not have an equal grasp of all English dialects or sociolects. It also seems to me that I tend to turn the sound more up when watching something not in Norwegian, without subtitles, and as I often watch DVDs in the evening, I prefer use the subtitles as a "crutch" rather than to turn the sound up loud.

The American movies I grew up with were dubbed into French, but, as an adult (not an illegal one, abi), I wound up living in an anglophone environment and thus became very familiar with the real voices of the actors. After that, I became unable to watch those actors dubbed into French, because those voices feel all wrong. There are exceptions, when the actors did their own dubbing, like Petula Clark in Goodbye, Mr.Chips or in Finian's Rainbow. Beautiful accent in French.

Some years ago in the Netherlands I was served in a bakery by a Dutch woman who didn't speak English, French or German. I think that's the only time I've not had some language in common with people in the Netherlands. On the other hand I'm not a regular visitor. (Wikipedia suggests that 87% of Netherlanders have a working knowledge of English).

One thing that has occasionally wrong-footed me is meeting someone who speaks fluent English with an American accent, and only slowly does it become clear that they're Russian, or Dutch or, once, Israeli. I find I've been allowing for the wrong cultural differences.

Serge #147 - have you seen Cyrano de Bergerac? Not only is the French dialogue in Alexandrine couplets*, so are the English subtitles (a quick google says that this was Anthony Burgess's translation of the play).

* Except when they're reciting poems with a different meter, obviously.

Serge @151 -- Since you had mentionned raising the French, I immediately thought of zombies.

Ah. Although zombies have become much more present in my mental world since reading ML, I wouldn't say they're immediately present.

Cerveaux manquant -- zombies. Français manquant -- me.

Neil Willcox @ 155... I saw the movie, but it was so long ago that I had forgotten about the unusual dialogues.

#144, David Goldfarb-

I wasn't a fan of tabs for a very long time, either. I finally tried Firefox for other reasons and figured that I might as well play with the tabs since I had them. The two things that sold me on tabs were an add on that remembered all my tabs and their histories* and the ability to use a keyboard shortcut to go to the last selected tab. It's interesting the stuff that will turn us off of an idea and the stuff that will make it work for us.

*Firefox crashed last night, and I reopened all 93 tabs and their browsing histories without much trouble. You do need to do something non-browser while it loads, or you'll crash it again, but I find that ability to be pretty priceless.

To everyone who responded to my question, many thanks. I think I have picked up some ideas that will definitely be helpful. The fun part is that the tricks I'll use at work are different from the tricks I'll use at home.

#136 - Distraxi -

I keep planning to watch more Latin American TV and work on my Spanish, and I never succeed. The first trick (and the reason I've failed so far) is to find a show that will keep my attention.

I used to watch an old sitcom called "Que Pasa USA" that I loved because the family included three generations - grandparents who spoke almost no English, bilingual parents, and kids who spoke almost no Spanish. I could follow the plots without knowing the Spanish, which made turning on the subtitles and working on my Spanish far more appealing. It's probably too dated now for even the worst syndication slots.

I might try the subtitle thing for movies sometime (I'm not a huge movie watcher), but I think I'd be distracted by the words. It's the same with comics: I read the words and never look anywhere else, so I miss a lot. The only languages I speak with practical use are English and Spanish (must recover my Spanish).

The lip thing throws me, though. When vacationing in Mexico with my family, we tried to find English TV. There was some, but the sound was noticeably lagging. I couldn't understand the words at all. Since then, I've been much more aware of how much speech I take in visually.

Distraxi, I could find a plumber at need-- same guy who fixed my trunk when the automatic pull-down broke by pulling it apart, messing with wires, and eventually using a portable jump pack (not that kind) with alligator clips and manually sparking the latch down to the right position. Some friends of mine had a housewarming party once; the rugby friends sat by the fire playing drinking games, the music friends sat on the patio playing music in an exclusive way, and the engineer friends stood in the kitchen watching him fix the sink.

It is interesting how the science-heavy background changes things. Another friend explained liquid chromatography by saying it's like a water softener... and the three labmates she told this to sat back and said 'aha' for we had just been told how water softeners work: like liquid chromatography.

O all-knowing fluorosphere:

Bruce Schneier's blog has an interesting discussion going on right now[1], involving the Stanford Prison Experiment. One of the posters has claimed that the SPE is not too well regarded in psychology circles, as its full details weren't published in a peer-reviewed place, and a later experiment contradicted the results. ISTR that there are a few people who've studied psychology here at enough depth to know, and it's far enough outside my field that I can't really evaluate whether this is true. So, can anyone give me some clues here? Is this study and/or researcher well-regarded? Has it been replicated or discredited or whatever?

[1] With a commenter with my nickname who isn't me--yes, that's annoying, though I guess I should have chosen one less likely to collide with others' choices.

RM #159: Have you ever seen the PBS show Destinos? It's a sort of soap opera/novela that runs through a moderately complicated story, starting with a lot of English and backing and filling to help you follow it, and advancing to more and more spoken Spanish. I used to get up for my son's middle-of-the-night feeding and watch the show every night.

I have a hard time finding most Spanish language TV available here very interesting. But Spanish language radio is much more lively and interesting, except when they start talking about futbol, and my comprehension drops through the floor. The downside is you can't get closed captioning. My favorite program is this medical call-in show (Dr Elmer Huerta), in which the doctor responds slowly and calmly in good-bedside-manner mode, explaining various medical things. I've learned a lot of Spanish and a fair bit of random medical stuff from it. (It helps that a lot of medical terms come from the same Latin root in Spanish and English. If you know what kind of doctor specializes in kidney disease, it's not so hard to guess what a nefrólogo is.)

US State Department redefines "Public Domain"

http://www.dsrt.fiu.edu/exportControl/definitions.html

"Public Domain (22 CFR 120.11) is a term used in the ITAR that generally corresponds to publicly available information under the EAR. Under the ITAR, public domain means information that is published and that is generally accessible or available to the public: (1) through sales at newsstands and bookstores; (2) through subscriptions which are available without restriction to any individual who desires to obtain or purchase the published information; (3) through second class mailing privileges granted by the U.S. Government; (4) at libraries open to the public or from which the public can obtain documents; (5) through patents available at any patent office; (6) through unlimited distribution at a conference, meeting, seminar, trade show or exhibition, generally accessible to the public, in the United States; (7) through public release (i.e., unlimited distribution) in any form (e.g., not necessarily in published form) after approval by the cognizant U.S. government department or agency; and (8) through fundamental research."

#162, albatross -

No, I haven't heard of that one. I'll definitely look for it, it sounds ideal. Spanish-language radio sounds like it would probably work for me too (I could do that one at work!) Thanks for mentioning it.

Peter 146: Well, this was in 1976. A great many things have changed in Germany since then, and not just from a landscaping* perspective.

*"That huge wall there has got to go. I mean, what on earth were they thinking?"

"That huge wall there has got to go. I mean, what on earth were they thinking?"

Sounds like an excerpt from "Extreme Makeover: Dictatorship Edition".

Or "Queer Eye for the Stasi Guy".

http://www.pmddtc.state.gov/docs/itar/2007/itar_part_120.doc

§ 120.11 Public domain.

(a) Public domain means information which is published and which is generally accessible or available to the public:

(1) Through sales at newsstands and bookstores;

(2) Through subscriptions which are available without restriction to any individual who desires to obtain or purchase the published information;

(3) Through second class mailing privileges granted by the U.S. Government;

(4) At libraries open to the public or from which the public can obtain documents;

(5) Through patents available at any patent office;

(6) Through unlimited distribution at a conference, meeting, seminar, trade show or exhibition, generally accessible to the public, in the United States;

(7) Through public release ( i.e. , unlimited distribution) in any form (e.g., not necessarily in published form) after approval by the cognizant U.S. government department or agency (see also §125.4(b)(13) of this subchapter);

(8) Through fundamental research in science and engineering at accredited institutions of higher learning in the U.S. where the resulting information is ordinarily published and shared broadly in the scientific community. Fundamental research is defined to mean basic and applied research in science and engineering where the resulting information is ordinarily published and shared broadly within the scientific community, as distinguished from research the results of which are restricted for proprietary reasons or specific U.S. Government access and dissemination controls. University research will not be considered fundamental research if:

(i) The University or its researchers accept other restrictions on publication of scientific and technical information resulting from the project or activity, or

(ii) The research is funded by the U.S. Government and specific access and dissemination controls protecting information resulting from the research are applicable.

(b) [Reserved]

versus

http://www.copyright.gov/title17/circ92.pdf

Sec. 12 · Works in the public domain. Title 17, United States Code, as amended by this Act, does not provide copyright protection for any work that is in the public domain in the United States.

Greg @121 re: Istanbul

Go, go, go. Yes, you may dress a tiny bit more conservatively*, but no more so than in many places in the US. Go to Google Images or Flickr, search on Instanbul & Street, and you'll see that you've nothing to worry about.

The standouts for me, based on the strongest of my (now 9 years ago memories) are the Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, the Topkapi Palace, the Underground long-lost cistern, and just cruising on the wonderfully inexpensive ferries from Europe to Asia and back again. (And if you like mosaics, there was this wonderful little church...)

Wonderful street food, meze (tapas), that tasty stretchy ice cream... all good. The bazaar was fun for a walk, but I would learn to say, in Turkish, "I have already bought a rug." That's the only thing that'll stop the sales people.

Is it a cruise that'll go to Ephesus? That was a standout as well.

Have you been on a cruise before?

I ask because the one thing they'll get you on is the shore excursions. They might charge $X that'll take you to one or two places, crowded with the other people who paid along with you.

Instead, with a little planning, you could pay 1/4th of $X for a guide and a car just for the one or two of you, where you control your time.

Not every excursion is like that--but ones that take you to standard tourist spots easily can be. An hour or two of research per stop now is well worth it.

------------

* iirc, don't show your shoulders (mosques will have shawls to put on otherwise), don't wear shorts**, and don't wear military-style colors or clothing.

** because (again, iirc) shorts are considered tacky for adults, a concept orthogonal to local religion. I did see tourists wearing them, there.

Per Chr. J. @ 152: There is also a tendency that Norwegians more and more tend to spurn knowledge of foreign languages other than English.

I met some Germans at a conference in Montréal who were very annoyed at people "refusing" to speak English to them. There are some political issues with English in Canada, but I pointed out more generally that, while every German I've met outside Germany spoke English very well, this was not at all the case for people I'd met inside Germany, and Canadians were no different in not universally achieving fluency in the second language taught in the schools.

Re 153, it's normal for native English speakers to turn up the volume when listening to something in a different regional dialect. I've also seen subtitles on US tv for thick accents a few times.

Paula Lieberman @ 167: Aren't those just two different Public Domains? I don't think the ITAR definition is supposed to have anything to do with copyright.

I might well have had second thoughts about flying into Istanbul on September 11, 2002, but the conference where I was speaking made our reservations. In the event we had a very pleasant three days in a beautiful city, although admittedly we did not attempt to go around on our own at all.

I honestly don't remember shawls being presented at the mosques to cover shoulders, but anyone in shorts or a midriff-baring top was given one--in a pretty offhand fashion. Those same people made their way through the bazaar and other public spaces without any problem.

Per Chr. J. @ 152

Hey, if all those other languages go, we're going to lose sources we can rumage through for extra vocabulary!

Seriously, although I love my native language (English), and sadly I'm not fluent (or even able to "get by") in any other language (I'm a rotten linguist, wish I was better), I think the world would be poorer if everyone spoke the same language (even if that language was English).

I speak English (obviously), can sort of get by in French (3 years of school compressed into 2 in high school), Latin (same), and have smatterings of Spanish and Japanese.

Right now, I'm learning Láadan. Is anyone else interested in it?

albatross @ 161: My partner is a psychologist, so I'll ask her about the SPE. (Luckily for me, she is not a clinical psychologist, but a research psychologist. Very different approach to life!)

Nancy C. Mitten @ 172: I remember reading Dr. Elgin's books and enjoying her description of Láadan, but I've never had the determination needed to learn it. Good luck!

Found on MeMo's blog, here is the geek hierarchy.

In descending order of present fluency

English (Native)

Russian (Good/Fair) [I can read it, and comprehend it. My speech is adequate]

French (Good/Poor) [I can still read it fairly well, hear it tolerably. My speech is atrophied terribly. Russian comes out]

American Sign Language (Poor) It used to be fair (or perhaps good), but I have not been even passable in at least 15 years. No practice, and it's kind of hard to read/listen to.

I can scrape by in Spanish, and sort of understand Italian. Latin I can get the broad gist of, but I have to grab a dictionary to decipher the bits which are opaque.

I can make polite noises in German, Japanese, Korean, Ukrainian, Arabic and Hebrew.

I speak menu in all sorts of languages.

It looks so impressive when I write it down.

I wonder what Fred Clark thinks of that change Typepad is forcing on people.

I studied French for several years, and then took a couple years of Russian.

One time I was trying to think of the answer (in Russian) to the professor's question. He said that I gave the answer in French. The funny thing is that I have no memory of what I actually said -- I just opened my mouth and Foreign Words came out.

Also it seems that I spoke Russian with a French accent. One of the other people in the class had first learned German, and even I could tell that she spoke Russian with a German accent. Our Russian tutor described my French accent as "good" and the German accent as "bad," which seems a little unfair.

I believe that the Russian word for German, nemetskii, means "mute" -- ie, "people who can't talk." That's harsh.

Laurence @ 177... I gave the answer in French.

In 2004, I went to visit my family in Quebec, 9 years since my previous trip. Someone asked me a question and I started answering then I stopped myself. "I was speaking in English, wasn't I?"

Terry@176

His exact words (in a P.S. to a 4/12 post) were "I haven't yet figured out how to turn off Typepad's annoying new comments-per-page limit, but I was able to switch it from the extremely irksome 25 to the slightly less irksome 50 setting."

(One of the irritating features of the new paging system is that there isn't any link to go to the last page of comments. Although there IS a pattern that allows you to figure out how to modify the URL to get there.)

Michael I. Reading the announcement, it's not something one can opt out of.

Me, I think it makes things less readable. If/when I get a freestanding blog, TypePad just lost me.

Michael I. Reading the announcement, it's not something one can opt out of.

Me, I think it makes things less readable. If/when I get a freestanding blog, TypePad just lost me.

After reading Cassandra @9, I found myself typing this:

"I have no memory of those events, Senator," I said.

(I had traded them for a nightsky full of hot air balloons, an afternoon in a treehouse with a kitten and four minutes on stage as the most beautiful Ophelia ever seen).

Serge @ 178: "I was speaking in English, wasn't I?"

I once read a story by Rudyard Kipling in which he talked about his childhood. He was born in India, spent his early years there, and apparently learned some of the language. Then he was sent "home" to England until he was . . . more or less grown up. At which point he went back to India.

Consciously he no longer remembered any of the Indian* words he had learned, but once back in India he found himself speaking words that he had forgotten the meaning of. He said that this was a very strange experience, but he'd heard of other colonial children doing the same thing.

* I know there is no such language as "Indian." I can't remember if he even specified which language he learned.

Laurence 177: I few years ago I was working with one of those language programs (on CD) where they say a sentence in English and you're supposed to repeat it in the target language (in this case, Spanish).

The English sentence was "I have three pesos." I got all the way to the end of the sentence and realized I had no idea what the Spanish word for "peso" was. THEN I realized that I'd said the beginning of the sentence in Russian, and it was the Russian word for "peso" my brain was tripping over.

I put the Spanish program away for the day. My blog entry about it was titled "Ya govoryu nur ein Bißchen de Español."

Drat it, I have to take another language to see if my brain does the same things. I already know I have the English and Not English slots in my brain-- I respond to all non-English as Spanish-- but let's see how entertaining I can be, shall we?

Xopher 184: Brains are funny things, aren't they?

Hindi, is probably what Lawrence (#183) was groping for.

This is a typical second, third, etc. language default. Spanish is our second language. Dealing with French, when stumped, the words and phrases and sentences come out in Spanish.

Love, C.

Laurence #177: Also it seems that I spoke Russian with a French accent.

I was told this as well, though it was first described as an "aristocratic" accent, which was apparently a nice way of saying "a really archaic pre-revolutionary frenchified accent like my grandmother". I have no idea where I picked it up, since I was mainly self-taught. My Russian handwriting was very neat (unlike real Russian handwriting). When someone went out to the airport to meet a visiting Russian geologist, I'd make a nice legible sign, which prompted one of the visitors to ask "where did you find a Russian calligrapher?" Alas, I've forgotten almost everything, including typing (25 wpm, which maxed out our antique Cyrillic manual, and about 40 wpm transliterating to Roman alphabet, Library of Congress style.

In my high school Spanish classes, we practiced our comprehension by listening to (among other things) tapes of Radio Havana broadcasts of Castro haranguing the masses. As the Cold War was still in full swing, this made us feel rather daring.

When I was in France on a school exchange trip, the family I was staying with also had a German au pair.

The German au pair had very little English, and I knew even less German. So we spoke French to each other, much to the amusement of the actual French children -- I have to suppose our accents were comical. And our slowness.

But the really entertaining part, for me, was that when we ran up against a word that wasn't in either of our French vocabularies, we'd try it out in our native languages -- and they usually turned out to be German/English cognates!

Nancy C. Mittens @ 172: Cool. I'd not heard of Láadan. Does it, er, work?

The weirdest dubbing I ever heard was an episode of F-Troop dubbed into Thai, followed immediately by the "Knights and Demons" episode (video here) of Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends, also dubbed into Thai. Even in English, this episode is bizarre: Peter Parker as a combatant in a thinly-disguised campus SCA tournament (he changes into his Spidey-suit in a pavilion); interdimensional Arthurian bad guys; and a touch of Lovecraft.

In both cases, the Thai dialogue would run out before the English, which just kept keep running.

Rising up from the periodic exercise of grading undergraduate papers, I find myself needing to share this, ahem, gem:

"Once again I must implement, violence causes more violence, and sometimes people fight so long they forget what the fight was about to begin with. An example if that would be Iraq. The military went over there to show them that America is very strong and whatever issues they have with the United States need to be squished, since American holds the better end of the barging stick."

Free donations of Laphroaig would be gratefully accepted.

Ralph,

I don't know if it works or not. I am capable of forming a short declarative sentence, and have translated my name (Hána, for Hannah (the Hebrew root of my name), which also means "flower" in Japanese (which is appropriate because of my middle name)). I am progressing slowly (still memorizing the vocabulary from lesson 1), and was hoping that given the lovely geekiness of this site, someone could communicate in it already and would be willing to correspond, or someone would be interested in it, and like to learn it with me!

albatross@161, I've read in a couple of places that the SPE wasn't done with much of any scientific rigor (I believe the guy conducting it was also part of the experiement himself, i.e. no double-blind.) and that attempts to replicate it have produced much different results.

I think the main problem is that it was a single experiment, and no matter how many people it involved, over how long of a time, it qualifies as a single data point. People will interact, they become the culture, and the culture gives the outcome. A single experiment with 20 guards and 20 prisoners would be a single outcome, a single data point. You can't say that there were 20 people in the experiment, and 7 of them abused their authority, therefore a third of your average American would abuse authority. A single individual can easily drag the entire culture down into violence.

But then, I may be projecting. I think I'd last longer than a week before I'd abuse whatever authority I was given. So, I may be thinking people in general would do better than the SPE tries to say. (Since we've already had (a year ago?) the indignant uproar about how wrong it is for me to think this of myself, folks can email me directly if they feel the overpowering urge to tell me what they believe it the proper amount of faith I can legitimately have in myself.) I certainly wouldn't design a prison system that relied on the guards being altruistic and perfect, there would be checks and balances and other procedure to make sure bad actors didn't get out of hand. But I think I could last more than a week before I'd start abusing my authority.

Re Dubbing:

I am australian, and although the Bananas in Pyjamas were not around during my childhood, they are pervasive enough that I know they have, in their native country, detectable Australian accents.

However once, when in Denmark on business, I turned on the television and saw the Bananas speaking Danish.

I cannot express the strength of the "being hit by a train in the middle of the street" shock* that this caused me. It was just weird.

I hope their Danish at least had Australian accents.

* I know there is a german word for this feeling, but having only six months of high school German back in the dark ages (circa 1980) I can't put my finger on it.

Hrm, I've just been inspired to check for closed captioning on satellite TV... only to find that, just as they removed the English SAP from the Spanish channels that provide it, they apparently removed all closed captioning.(*)

The joys of multilingual existence: not that I'm all that great at other languages; I have just enough Spanish to be sort of useful. But that also turns out to be just enough to become really confused when I receive the occasional email in Portuguese: I often make it to the second or third line before hitting something that is obviously not Spanish and going back to re-parse with the little bit of Portuguese I have.(**)

And I have noticed that I will sometimes produce a Spanish word in place of a Hebrew word, and vice versa. Odd, that.

____

* Although it belatedly occurs to me that what removed it is actually the upconversion to HDMI through the home theater system. Must try connecting it directly.

** It's actually an overlay over the Spanish; it seems to work well enough for the little I need it. I do much the same with Italian, and it's also a fallback when my French runs out.

Fragano, my sympathies. Large quantities, even jeroboams (not that Laphroaig would be put into such containers) might be required.

Just received from Amazon.com:

Now available: "Best Friend For Life : 75 Simple Ways to Make Me a Happy, Healthy, and Well-Behaved Dog" by Neil Gaiman on Amazon.com

My first thought was that this is a reverse werewolf kind of story, but the description gives more detail:

Revised, expanded, and redesigned, this handy paperback edition is loaded with irresistible photos and easy-to-implement tips for raising a happy, healthy, well-mannered dog, no matter what the breed or environment.

Every dog owner wants to communicate better with his or her pet, insuring the well-being of both dog and owner. This inspiring book has great tricks and ideas for dog owners of all kinds, from the first-timer to the lifelong pet owner—and its combination of simple, practical tips with delightful photos and inspiring stories of real dogs makes for a little book that has everything.

Just a little cognitive dissonance to end my day.

Diatryma @ 185 (et al):

I have three languages (well, one and two halves, at least), but I still only have English and not-English slots: whichever of French and Spanish I used most recently completely overwrites the other. As of now all non-English is Spanish (whether I'm hearing or speaking it), but a few days in France and the Spanish would have disappeared without trace.

Fragano @ 192:

The language seems familar. Does your student write spam for a night job? (Sympathies on marking: I've just finished 150 stage-3 assignments, and now I have to go and explain to people who should be far enough through the system to have figured it out for themselves about reading the question)

geekosaur #196: When listening to Portugese, I quickly know I'm not hearing Spanish, but catch occasional words, and keep feeling like I *ought* to be understanding more, somehow--like my language processing module is doing a lot of work and just coming up short on decoding meanings. I'm curious how this works for native Spanish speakers. I can't figure out too much of written Portuguese, though I don't see it all that often. On the other hand, I almost always get simple stuff (signs, frex) written in Italian, though I wouldn't want to try to read something complicated in it. (But I also see a *lot* more stuff written in Italian, for whatever reason.)

I noticed that by the end of a week in Barcelona, I was usually able to puzzle out signs in Catalán, too, with some combination of Spanish and occasional French borrow words in English, plus context. But I could definitely not understand spoken or complicated written Catalán. (I wish I could have spent a few months there. Geez, what a beautiful place.)

Laurence: Yes, does mean "mute". It's the Russian equivalent of the "babararian" of the ancient Greeks.

We had a student in my class who was fluent in French, as her second language. She did her first vocab test with french words, and cyryllic letters. It confused the instructors something fierce

Rikibeth: Cognates in Russian drive me bats (and there are lots of them, from french, german and english). The words look wrong and I have to find the stress, and pronounce them (or hear them said) to understand them.

re SPE: I think it would be hard to duplicate without having people who have zero understanding of what it was. I do know that several iterations of symbolic class have led to examples of strong dicotomy, including degrading behaviors and abuse; with the "upper" class dominating the "lower" class, even outside of the schoolhouse and those who weren't taking part cluing in that the "lower" class were fair game.

This was in high schools, as I recall.

I do know that the temptation to give in and lord it over someone is strong, and I've almost succumbed more than once, and it didn't take a week.

Linkmeister: I think a firkin, or even a pony keg might be drawn. At the very least we could just chip in and get a barrel; we'll have to arrange to deliver it in person.

Fragano #192:

Speak softly and carry a barging stick. By the right end, of course.

A barging stick is kind of a mixed blessing, really. It enables you to squash any issues your invaded people have with your country (+3 on saving throws vs IEDs, double firepower on airstrikes in civilian neighborhoods). Unfortunately, it also makes you more likely to be manipulated into invading foreign countries (-5 on saving throws vs smarmy expatriate con men).

Greg #194: I think the single experiment problem is a huge potential one. Maybe he just hit the jackpot with bad choices for guards.

It sure seems like there are anecdotal reports of this kind of meltdown of authority into barbarity in various places, from time to time. It seems quite plausible that this would be something that wouldn't happen every time, or even most times, but that would occasionally happen in a spectacularly horrible and evil way, just because the wrong set of people and events aligned in just the wrong way.

I spent three years in Israel, and can get by passably; I get complimented by Israelis on my hebrew until they find out that I lived there that long.

In any case, I find myself responding to cab drivers and people in bodegas in Hebrew, even if they start speaking to me in English. It was much worse right after I came back to the US, but it still happens occasionally.

Of course, I do the same any time I order schwarma, but even the Mexican workers at the Israeli-owned stores in New York know enough Hebrew that I can get away with it there - because it is just wrong to order schwarma in English.

In other news:

@194 Greg:

I'm not sure I understand what your point is about one person being able to drag others down. Doesn't that simply mean that a single point of failure is unacceptable?

The fact that there was a single data point should tell us, combined with other evidence, that the soldiers in Abu Ghraib didn't start out evil as well; in that case, we have a probable second data point. Clearly these are not the only data points we can extrapolate from. Further, once it was shown experimentally, we can more easily grasp what occurs, and consider this possible paradigm instead of doing experiments that I think all would agree are not acceptable to carry out.

And re: your argument in totality, I think I see a bit of a inconsistency; If you found yourself in a group that was abusing power, would you still hold out so long? Because by the end, it wasn't 7 out of 20, it was (nearly?) all of them.

I would assume that the fair conclusion that we can draw is that any group in power, of a reasonable size, will degenerate into acting that way. To echo you, don't trust the people, instead design a system that makes sure you don't need to.

David #204:

The other thing is, I think people self-select to some extent for these situations. If you're a good person, and you see that the prison in which you're working is turning into a hell hole, you may well bring it to the attention of your superiors, try to get someone to take action. But if none of that works, you'll also probably try to find some way to get out of any involvement with it. And it seems like many other people will assume that the brutality and horror of the place is just inherent in prisons (or military interrogation during an occupation), and try to find ways to get assigned somewhere else.

I think a lot of very bad and very good situations are caused by this kind of self-selection process.

Has anyone else been following the news about Cuba, in particular the change they're making to get rid of a lot of restrictions on foreign travel by Cubans? I don't know enough about Cuba to have much of a sense of it, but from the story, this seemed likely to be a very big, important change.

The story is here (in Spanish).

Am I misunderstanding the importance here? My Spanish isn't that great, and my knowledge of Cuba is pretty much nonexistent, so I could easily be missing something.

David Manheim: When I am translating (as opposed to just using my russian) the brain gets into grooves.

Language "x" goes in and language "y" comes out. So there have been occaisions I was the recipient of english from the Ukrainian translator, stopped, looked for the things which weren't clear, turned to the American with/for whom I was working and started to give him the Russian version of events.

#198: Gaiman wrote the forward.

I recall reading, on Gaiman's blog, about his adopting a great honking big white German shepherd.

I would love to see what abi and the other poetically-inclined fluorospherians could coax from this MetaQuotes seedling:

J: My pardon; did I break thy concentration?

Continue! Ah, but now thy tongue is still.

Allow me then to offer a response.

Describe Marsellus Wallace to me, pray.

B: What?

J: What country dost thou hail from?

B: What?

J: How passing strange, for I have traveled far,

And never have I heard tell of this What.

What language speak they in the land of What?

B: What?

J: The Queen's own English, base knave, dost thou speak it?

B: Aye!

J: Then hearken to my words and answer them!

Describe to me Marsellus Wallace!

B: What?

JULES presses his knife to BRETT's throat

J: Speak 'What' again! Thou cur, cry 'What' again!

I dare thee utter 'What' again but once!

I dare thee twice and spit upon thy name!

Now, paint for me a portraiture in words,

If thou hast any in thy head but 'What',

Of Marsellus Wallace!

B: He is dark.

J: Aye, and what more?

B: His head is shaven bald.

J: Has he the semblance of a harlot?

B: What?

JULES strikes and BRETT cries out

J: Has he the semblance of a harlot?

B: Nay!

J: Then why didst thou attempt to bed him thus?

B: I did not!

J: Aye, thou didst! O, aye, thou didst!

Thou hoped to rape him like a chattel whore,

And sooth, Lord Wallace is displeased to bed

With anyone but she to whom he wed.

Fragano @192, albatross @202: At least if you're carrying a barging stick (for fending? prodding your pullers?) you get to sing/hear the Volga boatmen's song (vocal sample, from here; others are available elsewhere, including a ringtone!?).

#208

Wouldn't you think that they would mention, somewhere in the e-mail, the person who wrote the book?

This reminds me that last year, right before WisCon, I was looking for "Portable Childhoods" by Ellen Klages. I couldn't remember the title, just the author, and several bookstores told me it didn't exist. I finally went to Uncle Hugo's, and the clerk there, who actually knew science fiction, tracked it down. It was in all the software as being by Neil Gaiman, because he wrote the introduction. It didn't show up on any searches for "Ellen Klages*."

There is something seriously wrong with the database software for books, I'm thinking.

*We'll just pause here to contemplate the irony of going up to Ellen Klages, at WisCon, to get an autograph on a book she wrote, which can only be bought (in mainstream bookstores) by attributing it to a man.

David@204: I'm not sure I understand what your point is about one person being able to drag others down.

I don't recall the numbers, but say he had 20 guards. Say he had 1 guard that was a complete b*st*rd. And his actions was able to cause 6 other guards to abuse their power.

That doesn't mean that 7 out of 20 of the people in the US would abuse their authority. It might mean that 6 out of 20 would abuse their authority, but only if some asshole was there leading the charge.

But the problem with a single data point is you can't really extract much of anything from the numbers. er, number. At least, you can't really extract enough to make any sort of a prediction.

Doesn't that simply mean that a single point of failure is unacceptable?

Back when I did satellite stuff, we had to error correct for 1 bad bit in the pipe, and we had to be able to detect (though possibly not correct) 3 bad bits. Whenever you have an agency that has as part of its job description the application of force, you should probably have a system of checks and balances designed that you can prevent a single bad apple from doing any damage at all, and if you have 3 bad apples, they might be able to work together so that you can't prevent teh abuse from happening, but the system should be able to quickly detect it, shut down, investigate, fix, and reboot.

I don't know if the numbers should be 1 and 3 or what. But that should be the basis for how you configure your entire system. How many bad apples can you stop and/or detect before crap gets completely swept under the carpet.

Of course, having two bad apples be the president and vice president will give you stuff like Abu Graib. I don't know what sort of system it would take to correct for that. Some things in teh design are just critical to operation and cant be corrected in any easy way. In satelite design, if youre clock dies, you're pretty much screwed for that channel and you'll have to switch to anotehr channel and another board wtih a working clock.

If you found yourself in a group that was abusing power, would you still hold out so long?

Yes. I believe I would.

Because by the end, it wasn't 7 out of 20, it was (nearly?) all of them.

I don't think so. I believe it was something like one-third of the "guards" had exhibited "sadistic" behaviour. Not sure how the experimetn defined "sadistic" versus simply abusive, or having overstepped their power but then self corrected.

I think one of the basic things that SPE supports, along with hundreds of real world casss, is that training matters. If you take people and give them authority to use force and no training on when and how to use it, you can quickly regress into Lord of the Flies territory.

But that's another issue with what SPE really tells us (if it tells us anything). Everyone in teh experiment were undergraduates. About the last thing you'd want to do is grab a random selection of 20 year olds, give them billy clubs, and tell them they're in charge of the physical possesion of some other randomly chose group.

It's like throwing parachutes at people and expecting them to be able to skydive. Wouldn't recommend it.

A lot of poeple don't know how to deal with physical confrontation. In a way, that's a good thing, because it means we're not fist-fighting on the streets to get to work every day. So, the more interesting questin is, after training, and possibly even sorting out the easily detectable bad apples, how many bad apples still get through? What's the percentage of good versus bad apples?

Once you know that ratio, you can at least start to guestimate what it would take to design a fail-safe system. That's the other thing you need to know when designing a satelite, how bad is the radiation going to be? How fast is it likely to corrupt my bits? And what are teh odds that any individual component (capacitor, diode, transistor, chip) will fail? From there you can start desiging somehing that can handle whatever level of failsafe and fail detect you want.

I don't think SPE really tells us anything usable in that aspect.

Fragano Ledgister @ 192

Free donations of Laphroaig would be gratefully accepted.

After reading that gem, I'd think you'd prefer nepenthe. Or better still, the waters of Lethe.

Diatryma @ 185

I already know I have the English and Not English slots in my brain-- I respond to all non-English as Spanish-- but let's see how entertaining I can be, shall we?

I already know I do that. I took Spanish for four years in high school and one semester in college, but let it get very rusty after that. Recently, I spent several years substitute teaching in the local school district, and would often find myself in ESL or bilingual classes. The bilingual was english/spanish but the ESL could be a mix.

As I said to the kids, solamente hablo un poquito español, but usually I would know enough Spanish and they would know enough English that we could get by. However, this would fall apart a bit when I would have ESL kids that were not Hispanic...Hmong, for example. My urge would still be to address them in Spanish, and I had to remind myself that they probably knew less Spanish than they did English.

geekosaur @ 196

I have a DirecTV sat-dish, and can verify that most of the channels have closed captioning. I leave it turned on all the time, because I have a severe hearing loss in both ears with almost no hearing above 3 Khz, and it's not a whole lot better in the highs even with the very good hearing aids I use these days. I lose significant speech comprehension, and filling in the gaps seems to slow my comprehension speed down, so closed captioning helps me follow the audio at normal speed.

I do have a direct HDMI connection from the receiver to the TV, so as not to lose any of the HD goodness in between, so that could in fact be your problem.

The SPE would be a very difficult experiment to replicate, for all sorts of reasons, but it does give us some data which correlates with a lot of reality.

It gives us a data point that says that people don't have to start evil for things to go badly wrong.

Reports of "badly wrong" which stick in my mind include broken juvenile detention systems, and the meme of prisoners deserving to be raped.

And I Was A Fugitive From A Chain-gang

[Insert Gandhi quote]

209: another lost scene from "Henry V" -

III.i. Before the walls of Harfleur.

HARRY: I counsel thee, trust not my shots are spent,

And every quarrel now be all exhausted.

You walk on groaning ice. This English bow,

This English yew and hide and twisted cord,

Impelled by English hand and English heart,

Will send its blow against you with such force

That, be the shot its last, your very head

Will leap from off your shoulders. Heed me well.

Or yield yourself, your people and Harfleur

Unto my royal mercy and my rule;

Or else resist. And when your town be lost

This prize shall make my battle worth the cost.

Laurence @ 183... Maybe Kipling was embarassed, as a kid, to admit to the other kids on British soil that he could communicate with the 'inferior' races and thus might have become one of 'them'. (Like heterosexual boys who enjoy certain activities normally associated with girls.)

As for myself, it was simply that, after 9 years of nothing but English (aside from infrequent calls to my mom), it took a conscious effort at first to remember to speak French. That often has me wondering if, when I live in an English environment, my brain really speaks directly in English, or if it thinks the thoughts in French and then very quickly translates them into English.

Fragano @ 192...

"I don't like the way Teddy Roosevelt is looking at me."

"Perhaps he's trying to give you one last word of caution, Mr. Kaplan. 'Speak softly, and carry a big stick.' "

Linkmeister #197: I'd settle for a direct flight to Islay at this point.

Distraxi #199: I am pretty certain that the student in question is not Nigerian. I am constrained to wonder how the student made it to a junior-level class.

albatross #202: Now that's an image!

Epacris #210: I'm feeling more like a vulgar boatman, meself.

Bruce Cohen (Speaker to Managers)#213: The waters of Lethe? I contemplated the waters of Styx. Sometimes you really wonder why you bother, when young people, with the world in front of them, don't even try.

Serge #219: 'And remember to barge in'?

albatross #206: El Pais is reporting that the government of Raúl Castro plans to ease travel restrictions on most Cubans (except medical school graduates who have not done their social service, interior ministry officials, and a few other categories).

Fragano Ledgister @#224:

Sometimes you really wonder why you bother, when young people, with the world in front of them, don't even try.

Panning for gold, maybe? You have to teach the turkeys in order to have the opportunity to teach the occasional non-turkey.

Or maybe it's just to entertain your friends..."squish," hee!

From Obsidian Wings: The Lincoln-Douglas Debate, brought to you by ABC News.

Mary Dell #227: There are, fortunately, students who want to learn. Never as many as I'd like.

Xopher (184):

The English sentence was "I have three pesos." I got all the way to the end of the sentence and realized I had no idea what the Spanish word for "peso" was.

"Tengo tres dollars", of course...

Fragano @ 229... So that's why my English teacher liked me so much that he introduced me to Mad Magazine and to Doctor Strange. Oh, and to the Silver Surfer.

Evan @209:

What, this sort of thing?

Capt: A dozen years have pass'd since this took place,

And all that time hath Parliament kept hid

The secret of this world, till River here

Unearth'd it from their minds. They feared she knew.

And right they were to dread, since many more

Among the spinning worlds would know it too.

And someone has to speak for those now dead.

For divers reasons did you join my crew

But all have come together to this place.

I've in the past demanded much of you.

Today I ask yet more; perhaps for all.

For this I know, as I know anything:

That they will try again. Another world

Will be the lab for this experiment.

Or maybe they will sweep this landscape clean

And in a year or ten attempt again.

They'll swing back like the needle to the north

To the belief that they can better men.

And I hold not to that. Here from this grave

I will not run. I aim to misbehave.

Capt: There's more to flight than buttons, albatross,

More to the pilot's role than charts and maps.

You know the foremost rule of flying? Aye,

I know you do, since you know what I'll say

Before I part my lips.

Riv:                     I do, but yet

I like to hear you say it nonetheless.

Capt: 'Tis love. Though you know all the math the 'verse

Contains, if in the sky you take a ship unloved

She'll shake you off as sure as worlds turn.

Love keeps her in the air when she should fall

And tells you that she hurts before she keens.

It makes her home.

Riv:                     The storm is getting worse.

Capt: We will endure a while, till it disperse.

Mary Dell @ 227

Oh, that's what Dutch Schultz was trying to say: "Bargees have never laughed, nor dashed a thousand birds."

Right now, I'm learning Láadan. Is anyone else interested in it?

I'd be more interested if there were anyone to talk to in it who didn't want to discuss politics to the exclusion of all else. But I think that's one of the perils of learning a language that was specifically constructed for a political purpose. That said, bíi eril alehala Suzette wa.

It still bugs me that the third Native Tongue book went so utterly off the rails.

I already know I have the English and Not English slots in my brain-- I respond to all non-English as Spanish-- but let's see how entertaining I can be, shall we?

The slots in my brain are "English" and "French", which makes things amusing when I try to read, say, Japanese as if it were French.

Fragano #206: Thanks! I got that much from the article myself, but what I was having trouble with were the implications--does this mean that Cubans can freely travel outside their country now, or is it still going to be hard for them to do so? (The article said they still had to have a passport, and I have no idea if that's hard to get or not.) Is this likely to lead to a big outflux of Cubans to the US or other countries?

And the context of the article involved a lot of other liberalization, like letting Cubans stay in tourist hotels and buy more consumer electronics. The whole tone seemed something like the Iron Curtain coming down in Europe, though not quite so dramatic. But I haven't noticed other news sources trumpeting it as a huge story, so I suspect I'm reading more into it than is really there. (For example, it's not on the top page of news on the BBC in either Spanish or English.)

Carrie S,

I recently saw something from Suzette about why the third book was so odd. She wrote that Láadan had failed in becoming a common language, and that the third book reflected that, and the women who had invented it picking up the pieces and moving on.

I am not interested in talking about politics, so if you'd like, I can point you at web resources to start learning.

abi @232: Woohoo! waves lighter

ajay @217: Dirty Harry? I'd like to fit "if you do trust in fortune" or suchlike in the last few lines, but can't see how to do it.

Nancy: I have the grammar book, actually*, though I've never found much on the Net besides the site you pointed at; are there actual useful lessons online?

As for the reasons for the third book being how it is, I know why she did it; I just think it was a poor choice--though not as poor as gutting the entire purpose of the Lines in Judas Rose by making the aliens Benevolent Advanced Beings Who Pity The Poor, Backwards, Violent Humans. They were much more interesting when they were people too.

*: The plastic comb bound one, with the bird.

Bruce C #213:

Why not champagne, to celebrate the fact that at least Fragano will be done grading (for the nonce) some time soon? Besides, it has the advantage of already coming in jeroboams.

albatross #235: If they have the money, and if they're not in any of the limited categories (medical school graduates who have not met their social service obligation, for example), then yes. That's what the article seems to say.

A couple of language-related things:

On a KLM flight to Amsterdam, they were showing Greystoke with Dutch subtitles. I rarely use the headphones, so I got to do a sort of opera-one-time-removed thing. On my connecting flight out of Schipol, the chap next to me was reading a Dutch newspaper. Damned if I couldn't read it at sight, without the usual tedious translating-into-mental-pidgen-German bit. Of course it wore off directly I landed and had to start speaking Italian. Probably something to the idea of the overloaded "non-English" mental slot.

To me, there's a strong relationship between 16th-c. Venetian dialect and Portuguese, but I wouldn't dare try to use this perception to get around in Portugal or Brazil; it's probably only useful as written.

On the afore-mentioned research semester in Venice, everything went fine until my husband showed up for the last two weeks. Greatly to my embarassment, I suddenly ceased to remember any Italian vocabulary at all, as I started speaking English again. Mind you, I'd read a lot of English, spoken English on vastly expensive long-distance calls to my husband, and kept up various online correspondences, but this was the first time that I had to switch instantaneously back and forth from English to Italian. And my circuits just fried. And it's only an oral/aural phenomenon; I had no trouble switching between more languages than just Italian and English (include Latin, 15th- and 16th-c Venetian, French and German in the list) during my travels through various archives and libraries. In fact, the various Italians and Venetians made me able to translate large chunks of Latin at sight for the first and last time in my experience. But if you'd asked me to speak it, well, the Life of Brian sketch wouldn't have even come close to the true horror.

#237 - yes, that stumped me too. Having done "Predator at Agincourt" (#40), I'm trying to work on "Aliens at Agincourt" as well, but can't get past "Hast ever been mistook for a wench?"

abi - excellent stuff; in half an hour I plan to go home and watch it again...

Xopher @122 : Because of the aforementioned associative earworm phenomenon, my brain is now happily singing "I returned a bag of groceries / Accidentally taken off the / Shelf before the expiration date..."

Give me a few minutes and it'll be "Your Racist Friend."

Yay TMBG Flood!

Serge @ 218: That often has me wondering if, when I live in an English environment, my brain really speaks directly in English, or if it thinks the thoughts in French and then very quickly translates them into English.

What language do you dream in?

I occasionally say things in French (and I think perhaps even Russian once or twice) in my dreams. I flatter myself that this qualifies me as fluent.

Laurence @ 244... What language do you dream in?

That's a good question. I think I dream in English. I don't know if my usually being a lucid dreamer (as opposed to a not-so-lucid one in the other world) might affect things.

And Yay abi @232! Passing on the link to friends who will go squee about it.

#206 -- Been following closely the changes implemented by Raúl Castro Rus.

Not that any of these changes mean anything for the United States, which is not allowing Cubans to come here, or us to go there.

Last weekend at the annual Experience Music Project pop music conference in Seattle, the Cuban guest could appear only via webcam - satellite hookup.

The biggest change, and the one that may be the most significant for the Cuban people as a whole, though, isn't part of this group of loosening protocols. It is that Venezuela is planning to assist Cuba into the digital world by paying for the installation of all that fiber optic cable, that Cuba never got because the U.S. demanded Cuba be left out of that globe spanning connection project. This would give the island enough band width to connect everyone.

As it presently stands, most U.S. homes have more band width than the entire island of Cuba.

Love, C.

More accurately, instead of 'most' I should have typed, "...many U.S. homes have more bandwidth than the whole island of Cuba."

Certainly a typical office building in Manhattan does.

Love, C.

Carrie 234: It still bugs me that the third Native Tongue book went so utterly off the rails.

I took it as her acknowledging that the first two books, which are good stories but filled with nonsense linguistics and other bad science, were meant as a joke.

I love singing, and have sometimes kept singing when I ought to have been eating, but I can tell you from personal experience that no amount of singing obviates the need to eat. That is pure bullshit. Well...the stuff in the first two books is less obviously nonsense, but it's nonsense nonetheless.

Serge,

I just sent you a picture of me.

I took it as her acknowledging that the first two books, which are good stories but filled with nonsense linguistics and other bad science, were meant as a joke.

Eh, given the state of the art when she started writing, I didn't think the linguistics was so bad--thought the kids turning themselves inside-out was certainly a groaner--she just took Sapir-Whorf a little too seriously. If you take Native Tongue on its own, it's a quite cool book; if you then read the sequels...well, Judas Rose disappointed me greatly, and I read Earthsong pretty much because I kept hoping for it to get interesting.

It's the snarky remark about how Láadan failed (though it's still around, and people still work with it) and Klingon succeeded, and how we should "draw our own conclusions from that" that makes me grind my teeth. How about, I conclude that any language attached to the wildly-popular Star Trek franchise was going to do better than something from three obscure sci-fi books by a second-tier author, and that most women are no more interested in learning a new language than the members of any other group of roughly half the people?

Neil Willcox @182: (I had traded them for a nightsky full of hot air balloons, an afternoon in a treehouse with a kitten and four minutes on stage as the most beautiful Ophelia ever seen).

That was beautiful! Thanks for the new memories. It fits my reading of abi's intro text above -- memories traded aren't memories lost.

Carrie S. at 238,

There's a livejournal group, and a yahoo group. Also, these links seem to contain a lot of information:

http://www.jackiepowers.com/Laadan/

http://internet.cybermesa.com/~amberwind/

(I found the following on www.superherohype.com)

Jennifer Garner and producing partner Juliana Janes have signed a first-look deal with Warner Bros. for their Vandalia Films, and one of the projects is the following:

"3 Days in Europe," a romantic adventure following a couple as they face danger and excitement on what was supposed to be the perfect Valentine's Day vacation. Vandalia Films has partnered with Hugh Jackman and John Palermo of Seed Prods. to bring the graphic novel by Anthony Johnston and Mike Hawthorne to the bigscreen. Eric Gitter and Peter Schwerin are producing for Oni Press through their Closed on Mondays Entertainment banner, and Jackman and Garner are attached to star.

(Never having read that graphic novel, I am unable to tell TexAnne how likely Jackman is to go shirtless.)

Carrie 251: Too seriously AND not seriously enough. She relies on people speaking Láadan (even non-natively) to change their cultural assumptions, but the Linguist households are full of normal kids who happen to speak an alien language—instead of culturally half-alien kids with totally bizarre cultural assumptions that lead to clashes and fights and probably coprophagia and cannibalism, who knows?

Either accept Sapir-Whorf or don't, but don't have it apply where you want it and be totally absent when you don't.

And the Interfaces are ludicrously craptastic nonsense. You learn languages by immersion because the desire to communicate is so strong, and because people around you are referring to things all the time as they go about their daily business. Child language acquisition works like that, too.

Putting a single alien in the Interface with a single child, for only part of the day, will accomplish exactly nothing. The child has no motivation to learn, and the alien has no one to talk to, and nothing to talk about (that is, no references in the world to pin the language on). Try it with a monolingual Spanish speaker and it won't work at all; the idea that it would work with an alien humanoid is not from our universe.

I don't know when she started writing, but NT is copyright 1984. I was out of college by then (class of '81, and I never went to grad school), and trust me, the state of linguistics was advanced well beyond any of the above nonsense.

Don't even get me started on her 1950s cartoon cavepeople; the men are goonish and monstrous, but the women are just like current ones, only sneakier (because they have to be); none of the women totally buys into the patriarchal society they live in, and ALL of the men do. In fact, not one man in all of those books ever says anything that isn't stupid, and she writes their dialogue to make them sound even stupider.

Because obviously no man is capable of noticing and objecting to sexism, or any kind of injustice. Their Y chromosome automatically disqualifies them from all virtues. And sex between a man and a woman can only be enjoyable for the man; women not only "lie back and think of England"; they pretend to enjoy it, thus ensuring that no man can ever learn to pleasure them properly. Then she turns around and asserts that some of them do learn! How? By magic?

Oh, I know. They sing. Then they can spend the time they'd otherwise waste eating studying sex books.

Wow, I didn't realize I was so pissed off about this, even now decades after first reading them. But the exaggerated misandry in these books sounds more like Andrea Dworkin than any kind of serious writer. (Yes, I mean that just how it sounds.)

Nancy C. Mittens @ 250... Yay! I wrote back to you a few minutes ago with a couple of questions. No matter what, I'll have the photo up tonight.

#251, Carrie S. -

I'm not familiar with Láadan, but can I assume that someone is using its failure to claim that women don't learn languages well or some such nonsense? If they're using any disproportion on genders learning Klingon to further their point, they're even more full of it.

The nature of Klingons as portrayed onscreen makes the language unfriendly to people who are thin-skinned, I think, and I can certainly see that many women wouldn't put up with the "culture" long enough to learn the language. [1] I think there'd be more people of both genders learning Vulcan, or Andorian or Bajoran, or anything other than Klingon. (Okay, probably not Romulan.)

I say that because my experience attempting to learn it [2] included the discovery that a lot of folks wanted to also do role-playing, for lack of a better word, on the tlhIngan Hol mailing list. From some people, this was delightful and fun. From many of them, it meant an extremely hostile learning environment. Many Klingon players interpret "Klingons are direct" to mean that "Klingons are rude" and "Klingons consider honor very important" to mean that any potential insult, no matter how trivial or accidental, is cause for an immediate and loud argument, possibly followed by grudge-holding. It also means never, ever admitting you're wrong, even when you are (although this last infects the fan club far more than the language list as I recall.) And if you can't speak Klingon, you should still be rude and argumentative in English. Because that's the Klingon way.

No matter how curious I am about how a language which includes subject, object, and negation as suffixes on the verbs will handle Sonnet 145, [3] it hasn't been worth trying to find out.

[1] Not that I think that Klingon culture as portrayed is anti-female. I don't recall enough details to say.

[2] I gave up for lack of bandwidth. I was in college and had better uses for those brain cells)

[3] They're restoring Shakespare to the original Klingon. Last I checked, (years ago) they'd finished Hamlet and one of the comedies.

Xopher @255:

none of the women totally buys into the patriarchal society they live in, and ALL of the men do. In fact, not one man in all of those books ever says anything that isn't stupid, and she writes their dialogue to make them sound even stupider....Because obviously no man is capable of noticing and objecting to sexism, or any kind of injustice. Their Y chromosome automatically disqualifies them from all virtues.

There's a strain of this in a bunch of SF, not just the Native Tongue series. Le Guin* went through a phase of it, and it made me abandon the only effort I ever made to read Tepper (Gibbon's Decline and Fall). Atwood and Piercy tired me out with it as well.

Basically, any book where the men are evil and the women simply misguided betrays the craft. People are more complicated, interesting and unpredictable than that. Sometimes I get irritated when an author pulls that kind of cardboard characterization on me. Sometimes I just get bored.

-----

* Otherwise one of my favorite authors; my teddy bear is named Ursula, even.

Debbie @252 - Like all markets, the dream market is a place of alchemy where we exchange dross for treasure*.

Not entirely by coincidence those aren't my memories; they're some I would buy.

* And curiously, so does the person we bargain with.

abi @ 258... You should try Elisabeth Vonarburg's Motherlands. No carboard in there.

abi 258: Thanks for this. It's nice to know for sure that my own Y chromosome wasn't keeping me from seeing how right SHE (initials, not pronoun*) is.

As for your teddybear, yeah, but that's a pun, surely?

*Oh wow. I bet it's a pseudonym. Never noticed that before.

Xopher @261:

Maybe I'm just misguided?

Martin's teddy bear, which predates Ursula by some years, is named Orson. That's both an OSC reference and a pun on Urson (little bear).

I have a coyote named Wile E (but he's THAT coyote, so I didn't get to name him), a Western* Velociraptor named Victor, and a raccoon named Sheldon.

*You can tell he's western 'cuz he has a bandanna 'round his neck.

She relies on people speaking Láadan (even non-natively) to change their cultural assumptions, but the Linguist households are full of normal kids who happen to speak an alien language...

Y'know, I never even thought of that.

Putting a single alien in the Interface with a single child, for only part of the day, will accomplish exactly nothing.

I'm pretty sure by JR it was specified that there were two Aliens at a time if possible, but that doesn't solve the motivation problem.

none of the women totally buys into the patriarchal society they live in, and ALL of the men do. In fact, not one man in all of those books ever says anything that isn't stupid, and she writes their dialogue to make them sound even stupider.

There're a couple of guys in the third one who aren't idiots--both of them Indians, IIRC.

I think part of the problem is that, if we show a sympathetic man, what do we do with him? Linguists don't go into politics, after all. Also I expect it's terribly seductive to grow up in a society that tells you science has simply proven you're superior; we've got enough guys who believe they're better than women even in the face of science saying they're wrong. How much worse would it be with "studies prove" all over the place?

Because obviously no man is capable of noticing and objecting to sexism, or any kind of injustice. Their Y chromosome automatically disqualifies them from all virtues.

OK, I'm gonna take issue there; the women themselves say that the men are acting in a perfectly sensible, just way given their base assumptions. Ned Flandry, for example (Michaela's husband) is a dolt, but Thomas Chornyak is emphatically not, and there are a number of instances where men say things to the effect of women being smarter than most men given them credit for.

Which is not to say the presentation isn't biased, because it is, but I don't think it's out-and-out misandry.

And sex between a man and a woman can only be enjoyable for the man; women not only "lie back and think of England"; they pretend to enjoy it, thus ensuring that no man can ever learn to pleasure them properly. Then she turns around and asserts that some of them do learn! How? By magic?

Yeah, that was dumb. Every bit of sex advice I've ever seen says, "By the way, faking it? Stupid. It just means he'll never learn what you actually like."

I'm not familiar with Láadan, but can I assume that someone is using its failure to claim that women don't learn languages well or some such nonsense?

No, it's a comment from the creator of Láadan, with a distinct tone of "What can you expect from such a culture as ours?" I'd think it was accidental, but this is the woman who wrote The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense

I'm with Xopher; my reaction to Carrie's post was "what, you think it only went off the rails with the *third* book?" Native Tongue was awful, awful stuff. I probably should have known better with the setup where women *vote away* their own rights, but it just went on in craptasticness from there.

abi @ 262... a pun on Urson (little bear)

'Urson'... What language?

urson

The Canada porcupine. See Porcupine.

Origin: Cf. Urchin.

Source: Websters Dictionary

Xopher,

Suzette Haden Elgin is not a pseudonym; she's written academic and popular nonfiction as well as the fiction. Her livejournal is under ozarque.

Nancy C. Mittens @ 250... Your photo is now up in the Gallery. Purgamentum init, exit purgamentum, eh? By the way, there are other recent additions, some of which were mentionned near the very end of Thread 104 and so may have been missed. The Gallery now has miriam beetle as the Tank Girl, Terry Karney as Dorian Gray, and Serge as the Doctor (courtesy of Mary Dell's phootoshop-fu).

http://pics.livejournal.com/serge_lj/gallery/000118yw?page=1

Serge: I know that when I get enough practice, I think in Russian. I also know there are things which don't exist in Russian, which do in English (and vice versa).

Carrie S: When the dominant not-English part of my brain was French, it was what I reached for while studying Russian. My grasp of the difference between a cause de and parce queif I had done "verb" then..., but the actual Russian form is even easier to do)

Now if only English had the equivalent of the Russian, "Begin parenthetical digression here" (in verbal speech), I'd be happy as a clam, because people would get less lost when I go off on a tangent.

Serge @266:

Well, I thought it was French, but clearly I'm wrong...

Terry Karney @ 269... the dominant not-English part of my brain was French

The reason why I wonder if I think in French and extremely quickly translate into English is because I find it easier to count in French, even 22 years after I left Quebec.

abi @ 270... You were very close. The French would be ourson for the bear cub. The male bear is ours (pronounced oor), and the female is ourse.

Ah...it was a spelling mistake, then; I have only heard it spoken and was guessing.

Rule One: never guess French spellings.

Serge, 271 -- I find it easier to count in French, even 22 years after I left Quebec.

A couple of days ago at the pharmacy, I was counting small change under my breath -- in English. The pharmacist, who hails from some part of former Yugoslavia, noticed and smiled. "You count in your native language? I do that." And I remember a colleague from China counting in Chinese.

Languages, dubbing, and Dutch: I have only ever seen Meet Joe Black dubbed in German, but I understand that the original version has the character Joe Black speaking* a Jamaican dialect to a woman in hospital. In the German version, he speaks (possibly slang-y?) Dutch to her, and it's subtitled in German.

*no idea how well Brad Pitt got it down.

I took one of Native Tongue's speculative elements to be: what if a radical hard interpretation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis were really true? I was as okay with the effects attributed to linguistics as I am with magic in a fantasy universe, and, on balance, enjoyed the book (while broadly agreeing with the other faults Xopher cites.)

The second book just seemed disjointed; I didn't go on to the third.

abi @ 273... Rule One: never guess French spellings.

Or you can ask me. Doesn't matter anyway because the spelling 'ourson' also works (and might even work better) for a Teddy Bear named Orson.

debbie @ 275... no idea how well Brad Pitt got it down

Probably better than Wes Studi speaking French in Last of the Mohicans.

As for counting in one's native language, thanks. I guess it's a common habit.

Serge@254:

Sa-weet! Three Days in Europe is smart, funny, hip, kind of sweet, and passes the Mo Movie Test. It's a screwball comedy for the noughties and exactly the sort of source material they should be making movies from. And yes, there is every chance we will get to see a great deal of Mr. Jackman. :) (Which I will be greatly looking forward to.)

If I'm counting aloud, I abbreviate the words. Len, tel, thirn, forn, fin, sin, sen, een, nihn, twe are eleven to twenty-- I picked up the habit in a couple of afternoons working timing and scoring at a racetrack. If I'm counting something smallish, half the time I subdivide it until I don't have to count at all.

vito excalbur @ 279... there is every chance we will get to see a great deal of Mr. Jackman

You hear that, TexAnne? It appears that this movie won't have you leave the theater feeling deprived the way The Fountain did.

Carrie 264: OK, I'm gonna take issue there; the women themselves say that the men are acting in a perfectly sensible, just way given their base assumptions.

But she never gives any reason for the women to have different base assumptions than the men. The women should be (mostly) believing themselves to be intellectually inferior and acting accordingly. And if they didn't, they'd be teaching the men to respect their intellect, not hiding it for all they're worth.

Ned Flandry, for example (Michaela's husband) is a dolt, but Thomas Chornyak is emphatically not, and there are a number of instances where men say things to the effect of women being smarter than most men given them credit for.

OK, here I have to admit that it's been a long time since I've read the books. But it's still got a distinct flavor of misandry, to me.

And also, linguists as the reviled minority who make everything work? Give me a break! It's like a parody of Slan.

Serge: Oh! Numbers. Numbers are hard. The only language I can read digits in, and not have it be English in my head, is Russian. I suspect this is a function of how had numbers are in Russian.

We had three 1 unit classes which were nothing but hearing numbers and transcribing them. I still can't read digits as being other than the nominative without endings being indicated a la 2me

Just a rant about the debate on the 16th: I didn't watch it, and was planning to ignore it. But I saw the Obsidian Wings spoof of it with Lincoln and Douglas as participants. I swear, I thought they had to be wildly exagerating.

So I read the transcript from the NYT. They weren't exaggerating. Roughly the first half of the debate time was taken up with the kind of goofy crap that would have made good Steven Colbert questions.

To a first approximation, I counted 9 basically frivolous questions up front (a couple were at least not offensively silly, though they had nothing to do with any actual issue facing the US), 11 questions with some policy content (depending on how you counted, as some questions were multipart), and a couple frivolous ones at the end. Of the frivolous ones, there were a few true standouts:

a. [To Obama]: Does your pastor love America?

b. [To Obama]: Why don't you wear a flag pin?

c. [To Obama]: Why did you associate with some ex-Weatherman who blew stuff up 40 years ago and may still not be an especially nice guy?

A couple goofy questions came Hillary's way, but the real winners were all directed at Obama. Both candidates also batted goofy zingers around at each other, though Obama also kept pointing out that the goofy issues were kind of goofy.

Now, I don't frankly expect much from the MSM, who mostly seem to have jobs that require more intelligence, intellectual breadth, and intellectual honesty than they have. But this was amazing. Both candidates are smart, accomplished people, and here they're answering these humiliatingly idiotic questions (and batting them back at each other). You wouldn't waste your doctor's time with this level of triviality--you wouldn't dare. And yet these two extremely capable people, one or the other of whom is quite likely to end up as president, had to stand there and pretend that their questioners weren't wasting their and everyone else's time.

I'll admit that Obama's responses to those silly questions reassured me that, as president, he wouldn't actually nuke anyone or order anyone kidnapped, waterboarded, and killed for offensive stupidity. The flag pin question was especially fun. I honestly can't imagine trying to answer that with a straight face and no ridicule.

I'd threaten to boycott the MSM over this sort of thing, except I already do--they only get my eyeballs at the gym, when it's CNN or one of those murder mystery "ripped from the headlines" shows.

If we really choose a president on the basis of things in the first half of that debate, I don't see how we've avoided electing some complete idiot who would....oh sh-t, never mind.

Sally Jenkins, a sports columnist for the WashPost, has an interesting column today on how China is using the Olympics to cow us.

As long as I have the WashPost site open, here's the Peeps contest top finalists.

People are bad at estimating risks, probably because evolution prepared us to estimate risks based on life in hunter-gatherer tribes and small agricultural villages, not based on man-bites-dog news coverage and intentional preying on fears to sell products and win election.

A blog I read, Effect Measure, had a link to a really nice reference for actual information about mortalities.

CDC Site

The information from this was amazing to me, and really useful. You can specify age, sex, race, hispanic origin, and probably a couple other variables, and then get a table of how many deaths were associated with each cause. You can follow links in these tables to find out more and more information.

I was moderately surprised that for people my age, accidental poisoning is a more common way of dying than car wrecks. Apparently, the poisoning is about half drug overdoses, and half overdoses of prescription drugs. (Suicides are classified separately, but I have no idea how accurate they are.) I would never have guessed that.

I was really blown away by the data for children. Accident is the most common cause of death (no surprise--mostly this is drowning and car wrecks), but dying of cancer[1] is about 1/4 as common as dying in accidents. In fact, we've got the accident rates down to the point where various hard-to-predict medical things kill about as many kids as accidents, which tells you how safe children are in our society.

[1] Malignant neoplasms--if there's some subtle difference between this and what you'd normally define as dying of cancer, I have no idea what it is.

Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers) @215:

Having made the direct connection between the DiSH receiver and the TV, I now have uglier upconversion and closed captioning. SAP is still not there, but that fails to surprise me. The DVR has multilingual support and is set to prefer English, then Spanish, so presumably the station that claims to have English SAP doesn't in the satellite feed. (This may be due to licensing, as the Spanish and English rights to sports programs are sold separately.)

I am several days behind here, so was astonished to read:

#138 ::: Terry Karney

...I make a tolerable handyman (and give me a mill, a lathe and a foundry, and I'm more than tolerable. I wish I was better at forging).

...and even more astonished that no one has, in the following posts, cautioned Terry that admitting to criminal activities, even here, might not be wise. The ill-gotten gains presumably go for the coveted equipment.

Via pharyngula, I saw references to this bag of 10 plush items for sale. Am I a bad person for switching between 'Ick!' and 'wow, only $20?'?

Kathryn from Sunnyvale @289:

Perhaps you'd prefer this version?

Diatryma @ 280... Terry Karney @ 283... I'd be curious to see which parts of our brains light up when we translate numbers as opposed to everyday communications.

Carol 288: You are joking, right? You really know the difference between forging and forgery?

I smelt a rat? Can the minds here hammer out a solution? I'd like to iron out the difficulty.

And I've always loved:

I work the iron

I worked the iron.

I have wrought the iron.

But you can't have wrought a check.

Xopher: Of course she's joking, she's wondering why no one has had the brass to start a string of metal based puns.

Frankly, I too was wondering.

Xopher@292:

She just wanted to remind us that steeling is wrong.

Serge: and the results of steeling can take years to iron out.

But you'll never take him alive, copper!

I'll brazenly step in to warn about where this might lead; what depths might it plumb?

Astatine to think this is rather dis-terbium.

Nonsense! Do not metal in the aferrous of others.

Carol @288:

I treasure the memory of the advert that stood at the entrance to Edinburgh Airport. It used metalworking imagery and proclaimed, "Clydesdale Bank: Forging a New Scotland."

This is even funnier because Clydesdale Bank is the least prolific of the three Scottish banks† permitted to print currency. Clydesdale notes are the least common of the four types in circulation* in Scotland, and tourists do sometimes wonder if they're really money.

-----

† In addition to the Royal Bank of Scotland and the Bank of Scotland. Bank of England notes are also valid in Scotland.

* In common circulation, I mean. I twice saw Bank of [Northern] Ireland notes in 14 years of living there.

Remember Dirk Gently and the gruesome finding of his fresh-new client, right after he was hired for the job? The client, Wikipedia helpfully verifies* "is found in a sealed and heavily barricaded room, his head neatly removed several feet from his body and rotating on a turntable."

The cops call it a suicide. Funny, funny scene...

...until today.

Because I just found out that a friend of mine, Austin middle-school teacher and pro-Palestinian activist** Riad Hamad, was found gagged & bound in a lake. His death was indeed declared by the local police to be a "suicide".

A couple of reports about this have appeared in the local news - but nothing greater seems to have hit any larger media.

I am dismayed at this. Riad's history makes this feel like either a hate crime or worse, an assassination by an interested party. Killing activists - that's not how we do things here, is it? Any activists. Free speech gets mighty chilled when it's bound, gagged, and plunged in a pond, and called suicide.

Note: this is not about his activism and cause. There is no cause that merits murder. I'm pretty much sitting here to share my dismay.

* Since my copy is out on loan.

** The nature of Riad's activity was to collect vitamins, text books, gently used clothes, and send them to be used by Palestinian children; he also collected donations for the digging and operation of wells and the planting of trees, and sold made-in-Palestine olive oil, camel pins, and kuffiyas. My understanding is that he was entirely non-violent, and that he provided aid to both Muslim and Christian children, and in no way focused on any particular group. But any non-violent activist should be safe from attack.

Dena discussed this matter with me before posting the above comment. Although Open Thread comments are generally not something that need pre-approval, I appreciated the heads up.

That way I can come in straight away and point out that the matter at hand is that an activist has been found dead; that the police are calling it suicide; and that that verdict has raised questions among his friends. In other words, this is not about Israel and Palestine, but rather the safety and treatment of activists.

And Dena, I said it privately, but I'll say it publicly too. I'm sorry for your loss.

Dena Shunra @ 303

Oh, Dena, I'm terribly sorry to hear about that. It must be awful to have to feel the pain for the loss of a friend while wondering if someone might have hated him or what he believed in so much as to kill him. I can't tell from what I was able to google whether that's likely; a lot of the weird vibes I got from the story seem to emanate from the FBI, who are much more likely to assasinate someone's character than the someone, and who almost certainly assumed from his name and ethnicity that he was a supporter of terrorists, if not one himself.

If you are at all close to his family, please comfort them as much as you can. It must be a terrible strain on them to have to deal with the death of a loved one amidst so much innuendo and uncertainty as to what happened. And being told your husband or father probably committed suicide can't be anything less than a hellish experience even when you believe its true, which I doubt is the case here.

Dena... My sympathies.

Dena, I'm sorry for your loss, and yes, I think that's an outrage.

It reminds me of the case, in the 1980s, of a Wiccan guy in the midwest who was scheduled to give a talk on Wicca at a local library. The day before that, he was found hanging in his garage, his hands tied behind his back.

The local police decided it was a suicide.

Rulings of suicide, it seems, either mean "this person killed himself" or "we think this person deserved to die, and we want to make sure the person who did it gets away with it." The Ku Klux Klan was an active part of many police forces in its heyday; seems like the Austin police force hasn't changed all that much.

As LMB had one character put it, "Seventeen stab wounds in the back, worst case of suicide they ever saw."

ajay @ #242:

You bring to mind one of Shakespeare's lost works, in which Prince Hal, due to an imagined slight, refuses to allow an Archer (or, as the text has it, Bowman) to come in out of the cold, and then...

...actually, it's not clear what happens after that. An existing fragment has Hal singing a nonsense verse about daisies, but most scholars now suspect that to be a mislabelled scrap from a draft of Ophelia's mad scene in 'Hamlet'.

Dena - how awful. My condolences.

I keep looking for the silver lining, but it adamantly refuses to appear, no matter where I cast my eyes.

Good God, Dena, how horrible. My condolences to all who knew the victim, and my fervent hope that someone in the mainstream media will jump up and down on the "suicide" theory, screaming loudly enough to get widespread attention.

Serge #271: You find it easier to count in French? Let's see, this costs a dollar sixty-seventeen cents, and that costs four dollars four-twenties thirteen cents, so the whole thing comes up to six dollars sixty ten cents....

Debbie #275: Brad Pitt got the Jamaican patwa down pretty well.

Fragano @ 313... It's patwa, not patois? For all I know, both spellings are used in Jamaïque.

One actor who did a good job speaking French was Kevin Kline in French Kiss. Heck, he sang la mer. (For those who don't know, it made it to the USA as beyond the sea.)

Dena #303: My sympathies.

Serge #314: Depends who's doing the writing, but the convention is moving towards Patwa as the normal way of writing the vernacular name of Jamaican Creole English. Di aadinari chat a di aadinari piipl a Jumaka.

If an Islamic court decrees it's official language to be Jamaican Creole, is that a Patwa fatwa?

(belatedly): Greg London @#17, since a "bear" is a state trooper (because they wear Smokey Bear hats), I'm guessing a "cheesebear" is a state trooper with a camera in his car, as in "say cheese".

Xopher #317: It would surely be fatuous to inquire?

Notes from the continuing war against the English language (or, I am still grading essays, and finals are just around the corner):

"Morality incubuses all standards of living that society deems important, and essentially defines all roles in society."

Lila: Not likely. I looked at the reports (as many as I could find) and the, "there was no, concrete" evidence of foul play" was pretty strong.

The police statement, that no one else was in the area (which they decided when they found his car; before they found the body) and the ME declaring a lack of trauma, well I can spin a couple of plausible suicide scenarios (scenaria?).

So I suspect it will sink, and no one who cares will ever be certain of the correct answer.

Fragano Ledgister @ 320

Now, see, I've been saying for years that this morality thing is an invention of the devil, but no one will listen. And I'll have a cheesebear on a role, thank you.

Fragano @ 320... That person's grammar really sucubus.

...and Serge can't cast a spell.

Thanks Bruce, Serge, Xopher, Lila, Ronit, Terry, Fragano, and Abi (major thanks for your support last night, Abi!).

Part of processing such an event is in the retelling; this morning, I had to tell my children about it. No, not the details. But the death, and the sadness, and the question marks left behind. A violent death is hard to explain in any circumstances.

The media coverage has not grown since midnight (which is when I found out about it). I wonder if this will make any difference, in the scheme of things.

#303 ::: Dena Shunra:

I am so sorry for your personal loss, the loss of a friend. None of us have so many friends that the loss of any one of them doesn't leave a huge gaping hole in our lives forever.

I also am so sorry that what truly does appear to be a hate crime is being categorized for easy filing by the authorities as a 'suicide.'

This did make the news in certain circles, though not NPR, for instance; however, Rachel Maddow on her program 6 - 8 p.m. on Air America, discussed this last night.

Love, C.

Constance 326: None of us have so many friends that the loss of any one of them doesn't leave a huge gaping hole in our lives forever.

I remember seeing a sign at the boundary of a small town once: "We have many children, but none to spare: please drive carefully!"

I find that echoing in my mind all the time, especially since I started reading the names of the US deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan every Sunday. OK, Terry will explain how military people are "expendable," but not one of them is "to spare" or "extra"; every one of those deaths broke someone's heart—usually many someones'; and that's without even reckoning the loss to society of their potential, or their own loss.

My hatred for the Masters of War rises up, and gives me a terrible headache, while it doesn't bother them at all. Dammit. Bastards. I hope they die and I hope they die soon.

Same with the people who murdered Dena's friend. I hope their bone marrow rots while they yet live (I phrased that quite a bit more strongly on the first draft, but realized that the way I'd written it violated my magical oath).

I really do have a headache now. I'm going to go do something about that.

Fragano: But Serge, because he grew up with it, doesn't see it as a string of odd constructions of scores and teens, the numbers just are.

The sentence at 320 isn't war on the Enlgish language, so much as an assault on logic, using some words from English as the weapon.

Terry Karney #328: Undoubtedly, but numbers like soixante-quinze (75) or quatre-vingt-onze (91) still seem strange to me.

The sentence is an attempt to grapple with a concept presented by Emma Goldman in her speech "Victims of Morality" (1913).

By the way, for the Francophones here: Aimé Césaire

has died.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/aime-cesaire-founding-father-of-negritude-.html

Serge @ 278: As for counting in one's native language, thanks. I guess it's a common habit.

I have a tendency to read numbers and single letters in the native language - so whenever some idiot writes leetspeak or similar, I have to read it very slowly and carefully. Of course, when they write like that it's unlikely they have anything interesting to say.

Roy G. Ovrebo @331

whenever some idiot writes leetspeak or similar, I have to read it very slowly and carefully. Of course, when they write like that it's unlikely they have anything interesting to say.

O RLY?

The illustrious Mr. Stross gets an endorsement from Paul Krugman.

No matter what goes on inside the brain, no matter which part of it revs up when handling numbers in one's native language or not, I often find myself thinking that there is awe and wonder in the very act of being able to switch from one language to another.

I'm more surprised that languages remain discrete so easily-- the only blurred boundaries seem to be when the words aren't completely interchangeable. Why don't I put Spanish words in with synonyms? Why not make a distinction between escritorio and pupitre in English, using the Spanish if necessary? I've met people who code-switch much more readily; I would like to examine it more closely within myself, but I can't.

Dena, I am sorry for your loss.

Dena, #303, I'm so sorry.

While catching up on old WashPosts, I found a Tom Toles cartoon that I cut out and put on my fridge.

Dena, I'm sorry to hear of your loss, and I hope someone takes the time to work up the case as a homicide.

It's not just a Military Industrial complex any more. It's a Military Industrial Media complex:

Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand

Remember: If you say anything bad about the military, you hate soldiers and Jesus will twist the head off of an innocent kitten.

abi @ 84: "1. English, in which I am reasonably fluent."

I have to laugh--if this counts as "reasonably fluent," then I cannot even imagine what eloquence would be.

"I have never achieved what I would consider adequate fluency in another language than English. Something in me secretly doubts that I can. That's hard to fight against, harder than any other obstacle."

I know precisely what you mean--I've never completely mastered a foreign language, and the possibility that doing so is simply beyond me is frightening. I wonder if part of what makes it so daunting is that your standard of comparison is English, a language in which you can do this. The idea of doing that in Dutch can't help but seem impossible. But here's the thing: doing that in Dutch is probably pretty unimaginable to most Dutch people too. Your comparative fluency in English exaggerates your lack in other languages.

"You do realise, all of you, that the storytellers of Euphemia are often hanged as counterfeiters?"

On the edges of Euphemia, the black market flourishes--always moving, always changing. You found it years ago, you think perhaps on accident (though they assure you it was not.) Now you track it by the signs scratched in dirty windows, by the shape certain birds make in the sky. The wind drops a scrap of paper by your feet, and you know the place you must go will be written there.

Some days it is a warren filled with steam and smoke, and as you seek your prize you must dodge clanking machines herded by wild-eyed men. You cough, fist over mouth, as you wrangle your purchase from the hands of a poorly-oiled clockwork salesman, before slipping off into the dark. Yet the next day you find it rebuilt in a new place, all hard lines and shining steel, selling its goods in automats and drivethroughs. The people smile at you with beautiful teeth and clear eyes as they glide past in their enormous, silent conveyances. A week later, you climb endless stairs to find only a small, silent lozenge cut from ebony lying alone in an empty room--yet, that day, their selection encompasses more than you thought possible.

(You wonder sometimes if it is, in fact, a single market at all. Perhaps every market you have visited is its own creation, and yet endures--perhaps it is only you who wanders. The idea haunts you: an infinity of secret neighborhoods hidden around and within Euphemia, never a part of it, but shaping it, guiding it in ways it cannot know. You wonder how much this thought might be worth, to the right buyer.)

You know that they are impossible, the memories they sell. They are filled with nonsensical things, vast things, ideas that stagger you with their implications. You know they are impossible, and yet you do not care.

Sometimes, you return to your home, carefully, furtively unwrapping your newest memory only to find that it has turned to dust, or perhaps was always dust. You howl with disappointment and impatience, your addiction unsated. You search the skies and walls of Euphemia impatiently, looking for the sign that will guide you back, so that you may try again to find that sensation you crave more than all else: wonder.

Diatryma @ 335-- I'm more surprised that languages remain discrete so easily.

I don't know why they're so discrete, either, but they sure seem to be. When my children were small, they instantly recognized whether a person was speaking their native language, and refused to answer them in anything but the speaker's native language. So Germans who tried to speak English with them got answered back in German. Little smart-alecks.

But the separation goes beyond speech, i.e. speaking. I learned to touch-type in the 9th grade, and it's second nature now. Enter the German language, and German keyboards, the most prominent feature of which is that 'y' and 'z' are interchanged (also, of course, punctuation was rearranged to make room for umlauts).

Over time, I mastered the German keyboard. Using alt + shift I can go back and forth between US and German layout. Here's where it starts getting weird. Regardless of which layout is currently in use, my typing pattern is still heavily dependent on which language I'm typing in. (I did in fact just type 'tzpe' and had to correct.)

/anecdata

Research on the neural basis of language(s) is fascinating, but difficult to stay on top of.

heresiarch @341-- you're pretty darned fluent in English yourself!

heresiarch @340:

You may be right about setting my goalposts a little high. I've always delighted in English, and I've been practising it pretty hard for a long time. I may not recognise fluency when it comes.

I would like to write poetry in Dutch. I think it would come out very different. All of the Dutch poetry I've read has been fairly grounded in reality, but that's mostly a product of selection bias. I don't know what's out there.

Right now, linguistic success is having a brief chat with my neighbor about when we're moving and where.

(Shorter me: Don't wanna walk! Wanna fly!)

& @341:

Wow. You turned a tossed off thought into the heart of our community. Very nice indeed!

Debbie @ 342:

When my children were small, they instantly recognized whether a person was speaking their native language, and refused to answer them in anything but the speaker's native language. So Germans who tried to speak English with them got answered back in German. Little smart-alecks.

A friend of mine whose children are bilingual[*] (he's Catalan, his wife is American) told me that up until the age of about five or six, his kids were very specific about which language went with which parent: even though they could speak English (with their mother), they refused to speak anything but Catalan with their father, even if he tried using English. As they got older, they became more flexible.

[*] Having grown up mostly in Spain, the kids are actually trilingual: they speak Spanish with each other and most other people around them.

Diatryma @ 335... Why don't I put Spanish words in with synonyms?

Because your brain knows that they're not two words similar meanings within the same framework/language? Of course things do get blurred when one word from one framework becomes adopted as one word within the framework next door. (Is it my imagination that French words adopted into English seem to acquire that word's more naughty meaning? For example, lingerie... Oui, oui?)

heresiarch 340: Your comparative spectacular fluency in English exaggerates your lack in other languages.

FTFY. :-)

Peter 344: Adam Makkai got a whole linguistic article after an incident in which his bilingual daughter came to him and said "I want to draw the Török Pasha in Mommy language" (that is, English). It's called "The Transformation of a Turkish Pasha into a Big Fat Dummy."

Serge said (#345):

Diatryma @ 335... Why don't I put Spanish words in with synonyms?

Because your brain knows that they're not two words similar meanings within the same framework/language?

I think Serge is right. After all, languages are more than just sets of words -- they include whole associated systems of phonology, morphology, and grammar that go along with the vocabularies.

(A trivial example: if you've got an adjective, how do you turn it into an adverb? If it's an English word ["quick"], you can usually add -ly ["quickly"]. But if it's Spanish ["rapido"], you would add -mente ["rapidamente"]. If you've got a verb, how do you use it to indicate something taking place in the past? How many different ways can you specify past actions involving that verb? Etc., etc.

Speaking, e.g., Spanish includes a whole set of regularities and rules [and exceptions] which make it distinct from English, above and beyond the words themselves.)

That's kind of what I thought, Serge, but I know so many different words for colors of blue-- and so few correlations with the actual shades-- that I expect 'azul' to creep in. The boundaries do mix a lot, and I remix archaic English a fair amount ("Okayest-thou?). I caught myself thinking, "That's all uraa*," about something inside-out once.

Boy do I need to take up Spanish again. I did not like most of the short stories I read in Spanish lit classes, but such a non-twisty non-English language.

*In aikido, you have mote or something spelled like it and uraa or something sounding like it. I don't know the spellings, and I certainly don't know the Japanese. Mote is when you do a technique straight in, frontways, straightforward. Uraa is when it's inside-out and twisty, but I think it actually means 'add a tenkan/turn'.

I meant "out of" rather than "after." Drat.

Diatryma, the term you are looking for are omote and ura.

Omote (usually -- this is flexible terminology) moves your center towards and past or "through" your opponent's center. Ura moves your center towards your opponent's rear, often utilizing tenkan footwork. Omote tends to be direct; ura does indeed tend to move your opponent in a more "twisty" fashion.

Serge #345: Hmm. Consider the difference between the meaning of 'canard' in French and English, then.

Belated response to Terry Karney @ 86: (though one has to be careful, a sloppy rendition of thank you can sound terribly offensive, sounding something like "prick")

In Mandarin, 'qing wen' is 'please.' Unless of course you use the wrong tone, in which case it's 'kiss me.'

I'm glad I got that one from an online lesson and not from people giggling at me.

Peter Irwin @ 142: On at least one occasion, a pair of adulterous lovers (in the movie Mogambo) were turned into brother and sister by the Spanish dubbing!

The US broadcasting networks more recently did that to a couple of lesbians in Sailor Moon.

Dena @ 303:

That's terrible and chilling. The first time through your post I read it wrong and did not realize it had happened in the US. Realizing it had, I'm almost too angry to speak. My condolences.

heresiarch @ 340, abi various:

I'm quite good at picking up pronunciation, so casual "phrasebook language" comes quickly to me, but I've never managed to get past tourist level in anything, and I do feel that my aptitude in English has something to do with it. (Although living in China has renewed my determination to get fluent in something.) The fact that it's a professional field for me and a lifelong obsession, not merely a medium of communication, means that when trying to pick up something else... well, I feel like a pro guitarist trying to moonlight on the panpipes. There's the sense for what the thing is, which is just enough to know that there are millions of subtleties in it and therefore that those subtleties are a lifetime's study away.

Diatryama: I think you mean omote, and ura. The latter isn't, "inside out and twisty" but rather, "to the rear", or perhaps, "to the back". One can think of it as left, and right, vaariations. It does tend to have more rotational/twising movement. The rear in question is, btw, one's own, not the opponents.

I happen to find some techniques (e.g. ikkyo) much easier when done ura because the extra motion adds energy, and that adds speed, which makes it harder for the uke to recover.

But aikido terms are an interesting example. The relationship between uke and nage doesn't translate to english. The closest words are all wrong (opponent/attacker, defender/reciever) and I can't imagine using other words for them.

Which is, I think, part of why things are discreet.

Different example: In russian the sense of time is very different from english. Things have happened, or they haven't and if one doesn't know they happened, one can't say they did. This is esp. true of verbs of motion. If someone leaves for a place, one can't say they got there without some personal knowledge (phone call, letter, report back from someone who saw them, email, you need something).

We got chided for this all the time. If someone tells you, in english, "I'm going to the store," and someone asks you where he went, the response, "She went to the store," is perfectly correct. In russian that's not the case.

"Oh no, ребета you can't say that; he left for the market, she was headed toward the market, etc, but you can't say, она ущла."

This would be followed with a long list of the possible reasons she didn't make it to the store. It always ended (no matter who was correcting us) with, "She could be dead. You don't know," (and now that ребета amuses me, because it means everybody, and was also always part of that correction; if it was a mistake in class).

So, I'm in the barracks, someone in a class behind us answers my question (which as in Russian) about where Zahler had gone with, "он ущ&еuml;л в столоваю." To which I replied, "You can't say that, he might have changed his mind and gone to the PX, maybe he tripped and hurt his ankled, etc." ending with, "He might be dead, you don't know."

All the ancillary meanings which come with the words are there in my head: some of them have changed (where I had one understanding of a word before I learned it in its native home, and a new now), and those flavors can't be conveyed to the people who don't have that sense. Perestrioka has an ironic, sort of false, context to it in English, because of how the press dealt with it. In russian not so much (though it can be bitterly ironic, that's not the default).

Debbie: re typing, oddly enough if I am thinking in Russian, the "C" will change its meaning, and become as an "s" to me. Very annoying. I think, oddly, that this is because transliterational keymaps all put the two together, and sometimes the "c" is an "s" in english.

I find that my hard won fluency in English (though not so much for typing) helps me at first, and hinders me in the middle bits.

English grammar is is thoroughly infused in my way of looking at words, and the world (the French and Russian senses of time were amazing to have revealed, it truly was a new way of seeing the world), and I struggle to not force other languages into its models.

Debbie, abi, Xopher: Thanks all! It seemed the thing to do.

Fragano @ 351... In France, a canard can also be a slang word for newspaper.

Serge #351: That's just ducky.

356

Given the current state of US news reporting, that might be a good usage to adopt. We see so many canards in our canards (even if they aren't enchained) ...

A friend of mine whose children are bilingual[*] (he's Catalan, his wife is American) told me that up until the age of about five or six, his kids were very specific about which language went with which parent: even though they could speak English (with their mother), they refused to speak anything but Catalan with their father, even if he tried using English. As they got older, they became more flexible.

That's quite common, actually; learning a language is a lot of work and kids do everything they can to cut down on how much work they have to do. Knowing that they can count on a particular person speaking a particular language is one of the ways they cut down on the work. Lemme see, where was that link...you can always count on Mark Rosenfelder for good information...

Terry, the left for/went to thing is nifty. Recently, I tried to explain to a Korean ESL student that yes, she was right, but also her teacher was right, and her teacher said things the way people speaking English do: "I'm going to the store tomorrow." Present progressive as future. I hadn't had to think of it that closely until she asked me why, "I will go to the store tomorrow," was wrong.

Diatryama: And to prove that no language is consistent, the russian for, "Let's go" transates directly to "let's went." The better interpretation might be, let's be gone from here, but that's not what it is.

Albatross @ 161:

The SPE was badly designed, chiefly in that Zimbardo set himself up as the prison warden. So the guy running the experiment was "on the side of" the guards, and the instructions he gave them emphasized the kind of excessive power they'd have over the prisoners. So it seems likely that a lot of the bad behavior was because of bad leadership. The BBC did a partial replication a couple of years ago, much better designed and without the confounds. Without strong leadership, the guards were nervous about excercising any sort of power and mostly retreated to their end of the prison. Eventually, realizing that neither side was happy, guards and prisoners got together and renegotiated the rules to create an egalitarian commune-type set-up.

...which quickly started to devolve into the unpleasant sort of heirarchical set-up they'd been trying to avoid in the first place. The experimenters halted the project before they could implement the fairly severe and potentially abusive rules they'd created.

In spite of the SPE's problems, there are a lot of other experiments that show people's vulnerability to group pressure (like Asch's work) and authority (like the Milgram shock experiments), so Zimbardo's original conclusions aren't entirely unsupported either.

Stefan #339:

This fits a general and creepy pattern. They're using information warfare methods on the American people. They're also using high tech intelligence gathering techniques on the American people[1]. More and more of that keeps coming out, with very little actual outrage resulting. We've made the war on terror a military and intelligence matter, and now we're seeing military and intelligence resources used here on US soil, against US citizens, to fight it. And once in use, the whole set of tools is available for all kinds of misuse.

I don't think anyone really understands the path we're headed down. I'm convinced that most of the people involved in the war on terror genuinely want to keep Americans safe from terrorist attack, and have no desire to see us fall into some kind of police state. But we pretty clearly could.



[1] I have no inside knowledge, but I believe rather firmly that if the whole scope of domestic wiretapping comes out, we will discover that something like Echelon has been turned on inside the US. And that this was just part of what's been done.

[2] The best explanation I've seen for why there's a huge push to immunize the telecoms from liability on this stuff is that a lot of damning, politically inflammatory information will come out as a result of these lawsuits going forward. Some already has come from those lawsuits, and it indicates, at least to some people, the opportunity for really awful misuse.

Xopher @ 265: I had a lot of the same problem with the portrayal of men in those books. Nobody questions the assumptions of their culture? And it creeps into the language--one of my main issues with Laadan is that the words for "love" all mean things like "sexual and emotional attraction without respect" and variations thereof--the assumption being that women love men and will probably choose them as lifemates, but that there's unlikely to be real communication between them.

But having read other works by women and men of the same or older generations, and having spent time talking to same, I am forced to the conclusion that more men used to act in these inexplicable and to-me-absurdly-rude ways. Which makes me A) extremely grateful to live when I do, and B) impressed by the degree to which cultures can change for the better over time. And also makes it easier for me to see why someone growing up with those boundaries to inter-gender communication might not realize that men also questioned.

Suzette, btw, is herself a wonderful person who is quite aware that these things have changed over time. I recall a panel at a Wiscon a couple of years ago where she in fact came to the same conclusion re Klingon vs Laadan popularity that you mentioned (i.e. that it helps to have the Star Trek franchise backing you). And her Livejournal hosts a terrific ongoing salon focusing on communications, linguistics, gender relations, eldering, etc., and attended by people of a wide range of genders, ages, and linguistic backgrounds.

Fragano @ 357... One could even say that the French were thus the first to get their news on the web.

R. 364: I didn't know that about Láadan. Note that she assumes gays and Lesbians will cease to exist, and that no one in her world will be transgendered. Or at least that the Linguist Houses are so superior that such defects will never appear among them. Or perhaps she herself believes (or believed at the time) that "romantic love" between people of the same sex is simply not possible, and doesn't need to be accounted for in a reasonable language!

Yes, more men used to act in these ridiculous ways. But Native Tongue was published in 1984; it was already uncommon. Even in 1884 there were men who treated their wives with more respect than any of her men do. She's writing a feminist dystopia, but it involves the inexplicable loss of 100 (or so) years of social progress, and the successful elimination of any knowledge of same.

I'm glad Suzette is a wonderful person, and I'm not going to ask her if she renounces those books! As for her linguistics...well, she's the author of a couple of books on transformational grammar, which is turtles-all-the-way-down nonsense, so I guess I shouldn't expect much.

Greg #212:

I really liked the connection in your comment between error correction/detection and enforcement of rules in the system. I've thought a lot about both these kinds of problem, and hadn't really considered the parallels between them. Now that I think of it, there are a lot of parallels[1], and probably someone has thought of this in great depth, but I hadn't before.

[1] Thresshold schemes, protocols whose security bounds distinguish between how many actively malicious, disruptive participants they can survive, and how many "honest but curious" participants, analyses of voting architectures based on minimum number of people needed to tamper with an election outcome, traitor-tracing schemes, etc.

Serge #365: In more than one sense, actually, as those of my friends who had Minitel terminals would tell you. They were on the very beak of technological change.

Xopher #366: Definitely more than 100 years. J.S. Mill, after all, published On the Subjection of Women in 1869, and his maleness cannot be disputed.

Dena Shunra #303: Oh my god. I was just reading about this earlier today, and now I forget where. I had no idea he was a friend of one of our regular readers.

What an awful, awful thing.

Terry @353: In russian the sense of time is very different from english. Things have happened, or they haven't and if one doesn't know they happened, one can't say they did. This is esp. true of verbs of motion. If someone leaves for a place, one can't say they got there without some personal knowledge (phone call, letter, report back from someone who saw them, email, you need something).

There seems to be a vaguely similar semantic distinction in Japanese for reporting inner emotions/thoughts and states of mind-- I can say about myself "Ureshii" (I'm happy) or "Tabetai" (I want to eat), but if I'm describing someone else, I have to add modifiers: "Neko wa ureshii sou da" (it looks like the cat is happy) or "Neko wa tabetai rashii" (apparently the cat wants to eat).

Fragano 369: My point was that SHE had no excuse for believing that no man would ever question the supremacy of the male sex, even back in the bad old patriarchal days of 1984, when, as you know Bob, all women were kept barefoot, pregnant, and chained to the stove by their domineering, abusive husbands, not one of whom ever let it cross his evil patriarchal mind that keeping women BP&CTTS might not be entirely just, proper, and in keeping with the Order of Nature.

And of course, Suzette Haden Elgin was one of these women, and certainly not a linguistics professor or writer, and had no reason to think anything could be otherwise.

Thought while reading #368:

If Minitel rolled out electronic text services to a massive userbase long before the Web arrived, why don't we have a French-dominated cyberculture today?

Xopher @ 366: I hesitate to keep arguing about this, because it's obvious that the books pissed you off massively and I can't really blame you. Whenever I read NT, I end up jumping up at regular intervals to complain at whoever's nearby, because men aren't like that, and language isn't like that, and the Nobel Prize committee isn't like that... But I think you're missing the degree to which things like LGBT might have been less visible to someone of an older generation living in the Ozark mountains in pre-internet days. Or the degree to which universities were still bastions of male privelege 30 years ago, such that a female professor might be less inclined to think well of male flexibility by being there.

Her experiences with gender roles, at home and in academia, make me profoundly grateful to live in a time and a culture in which those experiences seem profoundly alien. I end up not so much angry at the books, as deeply sorry that anyone has had to live in a world that could make those premises seem reasonable. And grateful that my worries about my academic job have nothing to do with being a woman, and grateful that I can live openly with my wife and only occasionally have problems because she's my wife and not my husband, and grateful that if I did have a husband I could reasonably expect him to treat me as an equal...

I bumped into the same thing in a subtler way rereading The Moon is a Harsh Mistress last week. Lunar women are described as having all the power in social relationships--except that the men all talk to the women like children, and the women all act flattered by it. And you want to shake Heinlein and point out to him that when society changes, people will change with it. And not just by having more sex, either.

FTR, my point here is not so much, "Don't hate the Native Tongue trilogy," as the more tangential, "It's easier to imagine flying cars than people who are different from the people you know... but if we could only have one, I'm awfully glad we have the people." So perhaps not so much arguing with you after all, and more working out these things for my own edification.

Some of the metal-working puns uptopic sounded a little heated. You should all watch your tempers.

- - - - -

Here's a question that occurred to me after I recently delivered a package sent from the "Magical Knicker Shop": Is "knickers" a false-plurality, like the old "pant"-vs-"pants" argument?

I've seen the pant/pants flamewars arise a few times, but I've never seen one arise over whether "knicker" or "knickers" is the gramatically correct term.

Also, I must say that I'm amused by the concept of "magic knickers", and wonder what special powers or protection they give to the wearer.

Perhaps they're kin to the magic swim trunks in one of Fredric Brown's short-shorts, wherein the aged, decrepit owner of the trunks would be young, handsome, charismatic, virile, and incredibly attractive to women... so long as he kept the trunks on.

Alas, a quick look at "The Magic Knicker Shop"'s website reveals the "magic" in magic knickers is merely one of size-control. I guess "The Magic Knicker Shop" is more attractive to customers than "The Gruesome Girdle Joint" would be.

Is a Gruesome Girdle Joint akin to a badly-fitting knee brace?

R. Emrys @ 374: Thanks for saying that. And there are sadly other areas of the academy where such things are very much still a problem.

I've not read the books in question, so I don't have much to say, but one thing that feminist analysis shares with science fiction is an awareness that we can't always see the biases built into our culture, and one way to take the coloured glasses off is to change the setting, reverse things, or indeed exaggerate the bias into a distopia. That doesn't excuse other biases, or make for timeless literature, but sometimes these things are written with the intent to educate, rather than traduce.

Regarding Sapir-Worf, it is mentioned in passing in one of Iain M. Banks' novels that the language the Culture humans speak is a conlang, designed by one of the Minds, and that if they stop speaking it for too long they also stop being quite so nice to their fellows.

Is "knickers" a false-plurality, like the old "pant"-vs-"pants" argument?

Are there dialects of English where they use pants singular rather than in pairs?

I know that in Danish and eastern Norwegian they'll talk about a pair of pants - "et par bukser", while in western Norway we'll say a pant - "ei bukse". Around my parts, eyeglasses come in pairs, but there's apparently places where they too are singular.

I actually found both Native Tongue and The Judas Rose interesting (although a little hard for a male to read, as certain male behaviour patters were exposed, even when it did sometimes descent do caricature). Since I've studied linguistics at the university, I know that linguists consider the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (or at least the so-called strong form of the hyphothesis) speculation, and passé speculation at that, but as an SF fan I do understand the attraction the hypothesis has for SF writers. I did have more problems with the audiosynthesis stuff in Earthsong, however, as the series then left science speculation in favour of something I personally felt to be extremely New Age-y.

Ralph Giles @ 377: Indeed, the researcher Ben Barres found his work was dramatically better accepted than "her" work had been before the hormones...

R. Emrys @ 362:

When I've read about the Stanford Prison Experiment I have in fact wondered whether any expectations about how prison guards "should act" came into play. My country still had the draft when I was a young man (well, we still have in theory, but in practice the military only choose the best candidates, or so it seems), which meant that I spent a little over a year as an airman. I was loyal and willing to learn and do my chores, but I wasn't very apt at the basic soldiering stuff we started with (I was better at the specialist tasks/desk job I got afterwards). If I were asked now to play a military man, either a private or an officer, however, I'd probably do an impression out of a movie.

Is "knickers" a false-plurality, like the old "pant"-vs-"pants" argument?

And just how much is "half a knicker"?

Xopher #372: I see your point.

Thinking about it, knickers seem to be plural when worn (I had to strip to my knickers), but singular when stored (It was in my knicker drawer).

Looking at my examples again, it looks like they're actually plural as a noun, but singular as an adjective.

Is this of any help?

(Examples from speaking English in South East England)

Bill Higgins -- Beam Jockey #373: Because Minitel never had an equivalent of Usenet.

Ralph Giles @ 378

That's the Lieutenant-Commander-Worf Hypothesis: "A warrior raised as a middle class Russian Jew speaking Yiddish** will revert to type at the touch of a bat'leth."***

* Thanks for the excuse to post this. I tried a couple of days ago and went through a series of contre-temps with my computer worthy of the Three Stooges before it finally crashed and took my previewed but unposted comment with it.

** Or was that my false memory of Theodore Bikel speaking Yiddish on ST:NG?****

*** I wonder what Sapir and Whorf would have to say about the routine use of the Universal Translator?

**** And an excuse for yet another footnote, raising the ratio of footnote to text to 3:1.

Paul A. @ 382

1/2 knicker = 1 snicker

Fragano Ledgister @ 385

Anyone who was in France at the time may have better information on this than I do, but my impression was that the system was highly centralized, and attempts by users to pervert it to their own uses (like turning the early messaging system into discussion boards) were strongly discouraged. This is based on 25 year old memories of conversations with French and French-Canadian engineers working on various graphics and character set standards committees that reviewed the Minatel technology.

#375 ::: Bruce Arthurs

Here's a question that occurred to me after I recently delivered a package sent from the "Magical Knicker Shop": Is "knickers" a false-plurality, like the old "pant"-vs-"pants" argument?

#378 ::: Roy G. Ovrebo

Are there dialects of English where they use pants singular rather than in pairs?

Yes, very old ones. "Pants" used to be made as two legs held up by a sash or belt, overlapped in the back, and laced together in the front to a pouch for the genitalia - the codpiece.

Monocles originally were more common than "a pair of glasses".

I don' know nuthin' 'bout knickers, other than "half a knicker" sounds like a comment from Mr. Ed.

My mother was fond of a rather elderly (to her, at that time) woman whose name was Mrs. Schmalhorst. Mom called her "Aunt Pony".

Bruce Cohen @ 386... Didn't someone once convince Whorf that prune juice was a drink worthy of a warrior?

Aargh. My mother was fond, as a child...

It's lucky I'm typing this,as if I were speaking, it would be hoarsely (and yes, Xopher, I am joking!).

Serge @ 390

Didn't someone once convince Whorf that prune juice was a drink worthy of a warrior?

Well, it is. It'll kick the sh*t out of you if you're not careful.

Bruce Cohen @ 392... By the way, I think that Whorf's parents were indeed supposed to be Russian Jews. Too bad the father wasn't played by Alan Arkin. He'd have knocked some sense into Whorf.

386: some Trek book author needs to put a Vulcan named Sapir on the Enterprise.

Picard: "Your hypothesis, Mr. Sapir and Mr. Worf"?

Actually, I believe Worf himself deemed prune juice "a warrior's drink!" after Dr. Pulaski gave him some. (IIRC, the Klingon beverage he wanted her to sample was toxic to humans, but she gave herself some kind of protective injection so she could try it.)

BTW, Bruce Cohen STM @ #392 FTW.

Wit of the Submit button: "if you don't respect it."

NASA a cappella

By the way, I think that Whorf's parents were indeed supposed to be Russian Jews. Too bad the father wasn't played by Alan Arkin.

Too bad Worf wasn't played by Alan Arkin. For that, I would have carried on watching past series 2. (Also: Bea Arthur as Dr Crusher and Julia Dreyfus as Troi.)

ajay 389: And, I suppose, Bob Newhart as Picard?

R Emrys #374: I guess that could just be a weirdness of the society on Luna, except that very smart and competent women in Heinlein's books often act in a similar way. It's perfectly plausible that sex roles in the future will move in ways we can't imagine and would consider a bad direction, but it seems like they ought not to be a rehash of current-in-the-day stereotypes.

And one interesting problem with this is that you can quickly have a lot of readers looking at some secondary part of your invented culture and thinking the whole book is about just that. For example, imagine a pretty normal book set in a high-tech workplace in 2008--say, mine. The gender and ethnic makeup of this workplace full of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians (and one physicist who ended up in computer security) would likely seem, to an American reading in 1950, like the most weird and important part of the story. Nearly half the technical people are women? And depending on how you do the classification, either just over half or just under half are even white?[1] And a few of the older people are divorced and/or remarried, and a few are single parents due to divorce? I think a lot of readers in 1950 would take such a story as some kind of radical leftist polemic on racial mixing and abolition of sex roles, even if the actual story didn't have anything to do with those roles, and was (say) a mild comedy of manners surrounding two young white postdocs getting together or something. That's in addition to the technology threatening to hijack the story--iPods, smart phones with calendars and IMing, laptops with local connection to the net everywhere, the net with all it implies, GPS.

[1] The East Asian, Indian, and black members of the technical staff are easy to classify as nonwhite. Latin Americans have been classified either way at different times and places.

Xopher @ 399

Yes, and Tom Poston as Geordie.

John Laroquette as Ryker.

albatross 400: OK, but now suppose someone wrote a novel today, in 2008, and set in the future, where ALL the white people are detestable racists and ALL the nonwhite people are supergeniuses who hide their talent and appear to submit to the white people (drinking at the Colored water fountain, etc.) while plotting their downfall. Suppose that in 2032, in a discussion of the novel, you see someone saying "well, see, it was hard for people back in 2008 to see how society might change."

That's the situation I find myself in wrt to SHE's novel (I was so tempted to call it HER novel!). There's a movie from about that time where the teenage boy pulls up in a fancy new car, and moves over to let his girlfriend drive; she marvels at this (her ex-boyfriend is a pig), and the boy says "hey, it's the 80s!"

Things were just not that bad (as far as gender prejudice) in 1984. As far as gay stuff, yeah. Being openly gay in the workplace, even in NYC, was difficult if not impossible. Same-sex marriage wasn't even on the table, and I frankly didn't believe I would see it in my lifetime.

But I had female bosses a lot of the time. Some of the older men still harbored silly prejudices, but some others, including some who were almost retirement age back then, were as non-sexist as I was (which was pretty non-sexist).

And SHE was already a university professor when she wrote that book. She wasn't living in God's Wrath, Arkansas and writing in secret on the backs of grocery receipts.

albatross @ #400:

It's perfectly plausible that sex roles in the future will move in ways we can't imagine and would consider a bad direction, but it seems like they ought not to be a rehash of current-in-the-day stereotypes.

I choked early on Marion Zimmer Bradley's Thendara House because of a relatively trivial aspect of this: one issue for one of the heroines is that the HR computers (and personnel) in the Amazing Far Future Great Terran Empire could not handle the idea of a woman having a different last name than her husband. I am no great defender of the Evil computers wreak upon people with nonstandard surnames, but this was a solvable problem at the time the damned book was published (1983) and made the book feel dated from the get-go. The fact that it even came up in a novel supposedly set in the far future to me said a lot about where MZB's mind was stuck.

Sometimes you come across authors whose complete lack of stereotypes and anachronisms makes you think they're more modern than they are, which is the other side of the coin we're discussing here.

I read James H Schmitz's Telzey Amberdon series as a teenager, and assumed that they were recent (in the mid 1980's). I was floored when I discovered that they were from the 60's and very early 70's. They simply don't read that way to me. He writes about a world where gender equality is a non-issue.

The fact that he could write so offhandedly about a world like that when he did does make me give other writers less rope when they fail.

(His guesses about computers are pretty good, too—he includes an equivalent of the Internet, and characters carry miniature computers around with them that are connected to the wider web.)

I like the ST:TNG recasting. I think Wesley should be played by David Spade.

I was rather amused when Voyager premiered that one of my co-workers's main complaint was there being way too many women in positions of power on that ship. And that was before 7 of 9 came onboard. My mention of this to a female co-worker was received with the appropriate sounds of derision, and her fear that next thing you know, the Federation would allow women to vote.

Serge @ 407

Well, OK, but 7 of 9? Really, you're not even considered potential management material in the Borg until you're at least 3.

abi @ 405

Yes, I got into his stories in my teens, too, but a little earlier than the '80s :-). As I remember them, race was also a non-issue. He deliberately covered over ethnic background with contrived names, and there's no overt racial behavior on anyone's part (and not even a lot of xenophobia towards nonhumans), but there are subtle hints and casual mentions in places of racial or ethnic group differences in general phenotype and cultural background, which are almost never the cause of antisocial behavior towards them. I'm sure I remember at least one story where a character is mentioned in passing as having very dark skin, and it doesn't enter into the story in any other way than as part of the character's physical description.

Although there sure are a lot of mad scientists, which makes me wonder about the university system.

I just saw "Jarhead" last night, and I could see either Jake Gyllenhall or Jamie Foxx as Data. Two very different interpretations, I bet.

Serge @ #397:

My hit graph was burning!

Through a very logical set of free associations starting with those clouds and ending with a Tiny Toons episode, I will this evening see how the TMBG "Istanbul" works as a polka.

Bruce Cohen @ 408... you're not even considered potential management material in the Borg until you're at least 3

"Madame 2 of 9?"

"Yes, drone 76 of 3455?"

"I think there is a problem with your project's requirements."

"You will do as ordered, drone 76 of 3455."

"Butbutbut.."

"Resistance is futile. Prepare to be assimilated."

...from a lost episode of Voyager

"We'll always have Paris. He'll make an excellent drone."

- Humphrey Borgart

Serge @ 412

"No, Catbert, evil Drone of HR, this isn't pointy hair, it's a Wi-Fi antenna."

Bruce Cohen #388: That's because it was being run by a state monopoly telephone company, and it was being run as an entirely centralised system within quite rigid lines.

Susan @404 on MZB's Thendara House:

the HR computers (and personnel) in the Amazing Far Future Great Terran Empire could not handle the idea of a woman having a different last name than her husband. I am no great defender of the Evil computers wreak upon people with nonstandard surnames, but this was a solvable problem at the time the damned book was published (1983) and made the book feel dated from the get-go.

I guess MZB had never heard of e.g. Iceland - just one of the places where last names don't Work That Way.

Because it is springtime and evil plants are clouding the air with their evil pollens, I've written my obligatory post on what is, in my non-sneezing opinion, the best ever thing for pollen / nose-based allergies*.

I've run into too many people who've never even heard of it** to know that they should give it a try. Since I'm able to go outdoors without tissues, Its my duty to point to it as why I can do so.

-------

* cromolyn spray: prevents histamines from being released, over the counter, non-addictive, not a steroid.

**it doesn't get advertised much (vs a prescription like Flonase) and on the shelf it could look like merely a pricey steroid spray.

Roy G. Ovrebo #416: Nor had she ever heard of the normal practice in Spain, which is that a woman does not normally abandon her family name (which is patronym plus matronym) when she marries. Though she may socially be known as señora de (patronym +husband's patronym).

I've read a couple books in which the explicitly white people were explicitly racist-- or in one case, a colony ship full of nasty hate groups was sent to a nasty planet and recombined into Super Hate Group-- and it annoys me. Yes, there will be racial politics in the future. But they'll be different racial politics. Feminism has changed since my mother marched. It's changed since her mother, and her grandmother, all the way back to the beginning. The arguments had better have changed by the time I have children, because if the future isn't different, what is the present for?

It bugs me more when it's part of a systemic problem in the book, where the story says it's feminist and is actually rather not. Sigh.

Was it Starship Troopers which ended with the sudden revelation that the lead character was Filipino? I always thought that was one of the sneakiest sandbaggings of stereotyping I'd ever run across.

Fragano:

The irony is that on Darkover itself, naming practices were not strictly patronymic. I don't have the details at my fingertips, but there was hyphenation, children taking the name of the higher-ranked parent, daughters and sons taking different parents' names, etc. MZB also had a specifically Spanish strain in the regressed-to-feudal planetary culture.

It was just the advanced, egalitarian Terran Empire that was completely shocked at the notion that a woman would have any name other than her husband's and whose computers couldn't handle any other possibility. That really is not a logical extrapolation from 1983 into a non-dystopian future where women have full equality. I'm not sure when the practice of keeping one's name at marriage became not-that-rare (if still not a majority choice) in mainstream American culture, but I can testify that it was around at least by 1977, when I was fascinated by my fourth-grade science teacher, Ms. Lewis, whose name was (1) different from her husband's and (2) used with "Ms." First time I'd ever encountered "Ms." I wonder if she had any idea what a feminist role model she was for a little girl.

Linkmeister @ 420: It was.

"Yes, there will be racial politics in the future. But they'll be different racial politics."

There was a cute story, published decades ago in The Space Gamer, in which a visitor to a starport bar witnesses a bizarre variety of cyborgs, gene-altered humans, uplifted beasts and so on come in to relax and hoist a few. Everyone is getting along just fine . . . then the visitor lets slip that he's an alien. Everyone is shocked and disgusted. The kindest person present brusquely tells him that his kind is not welcome and to leave ASAP.

* * *

One of the most aggravating things commonly said about science fiction: "Good science fiction is really about the present."

Um, no. That's an out for lazy scriptwriters who substitute transparent parables for an earnest attempt at extrapolation. There will always be limits to our attempts to imagine different societies. I mean, duh. But you can try.

It starts by putting away your axe and turning off the grinder.

susan,

I'm not sure when the practice of keeping one's name at marriage became not-that-rare (if still not a majority choice) in mainstream American culture, but I can testify that it was around at least by 1977,

i'm personally very grateful to be the second generation of that kind of woman. my now-husband's family is traditional in a lot of ways, & i did get a lot of people asking me why i wasn't planning to change my name. "it just seems natural to me; my mother never changed her name" shut people up really good. no one wants to be second-guessing someone else's mother.

dena,

i'm very sorry for your loss (your post was way up there, but i'm only seeing it now, after passover holidays). i hope you (& godwilling others) can make enough noise that the authorities have to, at the very least, say why they're so sure it was suicide.

miriam@424: i did get a lot of people asking me why i wasn't planning to change my name.

I wouldn't say it's neccessarily purely sexist (culture occurs to some people like the law of gravity, it just is), but either way, it certainly is annoying.

A.J. Luxton @ 380: Thanks, I'd forgotten about that one. You'd think after all this and what happened with orchestra auditions there would be more attempts to implement blinds for things like journal peer review...

Sorry (if that's the word) to hear you're forking your blog btw, I just started reading it. Hope you stick around here, one way or another.

Bruce Cohen @ 386: See, everyone thought adding and empath to bridge crew a sign of '90s therapy culture, but really it was to cut down on the diplomatic incidents the "universal" translator was always causing!

Bruce@410: I just saw "Jarhead" last night,

good movie.

One of the few war movies I've seen in a long time that is completely free of war handwavium.

There's a completely non-spoiler scene near the begnning where n enqvb qbrfa'g jbex naq fbzrbar unf gb eha haqre sver gb nabgure sbk ubyr gb trg nabgure onggrel, gura onpx gb gurve bevtvany cbfvgvba, bayl gb svaq bhg gur onggrel vf qrnq, and I remember thinking, "Yeah baby!" It was like seeing rust on a spaceship in a science fiction movie.

and I could see either Jake Gyllenhall or Jamie Foxx as Data. Two very different interpretations, I bet.

Jake is a damn fine actor, in my opinion. There isn't a role I can't imagine him pulling off well. I can imagine him kicking ass as Data.

I'm not nearly as familiar with Jamie Foxx, so I can't really say.

Ralph@427: empath to bridge crew a sign of '90s therapy culture

I thought they took Spock's vulcan character and split his logical side into Data and his "mind meld" side into Troi. The only problem they didn't forsee was that every time any issue could be easily solved by an empath who could read minds at a great distance, they had to knock her unconscious, put her out of communication range, or tune down the granularity of her perceptions till she was a pointless emotive repeater.

great joy and gratitude... great joy and gratitude...

One of the most aggravating things commonly said about science fiction: "Good science fiction is really about the present."

Without the qualifier, I think this approaches reasonable. We're all creatures of our time; I don't think we can really escape that. When we read Victorian science fiction, we can read it as fiction, surely, but we can also learn about the Victorians: what they hoped for, what they feared, what they thought worth noting, what they assumed was true.

I think it's John Clute who has a theory about how novels have a "Real Year" which is the time that informs their sensibility, regardless of the literal setting of the text. I think it's true that for a lot of modern science fiction, the Real Year is now.

greg,

I wouldn't say it's neccessarily purely sexist (culture occurs to some people like the law of gravity, it just is),

i agree. my mum-in-law is a smart & insightful woman, & i feel like if she had been born ten years later (she is about ten years older than my mother) or maybe to more canadianized parents (her parents were japanese immigrants), she would totally be a feminist. as it is, she talks about 80% egalitarian & 20% unexamined patriarchal assumptions.

(this is, of course, just my unfair impression as a privileged young white woman raised in a fairly feminist household by two native-born us citizens.)

re: naming

I did not have a middle name on my birth certificate. Paula Jean might have been an option but my mom was Norma Jane and my sister Sarah Jane.

When I got married I took the option and moved my maiden name to the middle name position. It took until the mid-80s to get every place that you give your name (magazine subscriptions, etc.) to stop putting a f-ing hyphen between the Helm and the Murray.

Greg 429: That episode is so bad that whenever it's on I have to stop watching all forms of Trek for two weeks...even if I don't watch it.

Norma Jean (not Jane). ooops

Greg @ #426:

I've started sitting my male friends down for serious conversations when they get married:

- do you plan to change your name?

- why not?

- don't you feel like you won't really be a family if you don't change their name?

- what about when your kids have a different name from you?

- do you plan to quit your job if you have kids, at least for a few years?

- won't you feel guilty about not being a full-time parent?

etc. etc. etc. The whole range of questions that my female friends have to go through over and over again. Most of the guys get it at about the halfway point, after starting off somewhere between confused and hostile.

Susan@435: I've started sitting my male friends down

Except it isn't all gender driven. That'll get a lot of it. But some of it is simply culture, which means some women will have resistance to anyone not conforming. And if you ask those women those same questions, they might very well answer "Yes, I did. She should too." At which point, the questions need to expand from simple empathy like "put yourself in her shoes" and expand more into representative language and concepts like justice, i.e. "what's right for you isn't necessarily right for them."

The subthread on marriage and names reminds me of Frisbie's explanation of the name non-change when he married: she felt that Mrs Frisbie was his mother, and hyphenation was a non-starter.

(My favorite married-name weirdness: the great-aunt whose maiden name and married name are the same. She's buried next to her brother. Someone in the future will have a headache sorting it out.)

Greg: I think you're missing the point. These conversations with female friends happen pretty automatically - someone brings it up with women, family or friends or whoever. Often over and over again. You don't even have to be getting married - I've had people hear my last name and immediately make a comment about how glad I will be to get rid of it when I get married. (As if! As if twice!) It's not about the reactions of any particular individual; my female friends have made all sorts of different choices. It's about the fact that for women it comes up and for men it doesn't. So men don't have to think about it. And I'm tired of that discrepancy.

I've assembled a list of questions for MM's too, for similar reasons.

I've got a friend whose maiden name and married name are the same, and her husband and father have the same given name. But both are very, very common names, and (iirc) the husband was willing to modify his first name if requested (it wasn't) i.e. from William to Bill.

Susan, we have friends who decided that, because of his job o lack of it made him the natural default to be a stay-at-home dad. (she's some kind of computer scientist and is a teacher/maybe professor at U. Kans.)

It's a good thing in ways, because both their children, both born prematurely, have both been diagnosed as being on the Autism spectrum.

it's not a good thing in other ways because until now they were pretty laissaize faire parents, which made some things, like SF club meetings in the ginormous Victorian Mansion that is KC's Writer's Place, terrifying to those of us who pay attention to small children.

As a child, my great-grandmother shocked the room by proclaiming that it wasn't fair that girls had to change their names when they got married, and that she wasn't going to change hers.

As it turned out, she found someone with the same last name to marry, which couldn't have been easy, given that the name in question was Baloun (pronounced "balloon" and means...balloon). A little easier in a Bohemian ghetto, but not like Smith or something.

Linkmeister: It's not an ending, but late in the book where he says they spoke tagalog at home. I'd thought, because of his mother being in Buenos Aires that he was Argentine.

The movie (gacckkk) made them all Argentines.

Re names: Honestly, I can't imagine Maia taking a new name when we get around to actually getting married.

Greg: Putting the ROT-13 into an url makes it impossible to decipher it directly, least for me, usuing l33t-key.

Terry: I had no trouble deciphering it using LeetKey. What is the nature of your difficulty?

Roy G. Ovrebo @416::

It's worth noting that as recently as the mid 1990s I was encountering order entry systems in the US that couldn't deal with international addresses. (I was writing order entry systems back then, so tended to notice various infelicities — and the occasional good idea — in other such systems.) Since then, the web seems to have cured that in large part; but I still occasionally run into systems that can't even handle my university shipping address, much less some of the longer international addresses.

(As for the original issue: in the 80s? Yes, there were indeed systems inflexible enough to make the name issue rather difficult to deal with sanely. Usually bureaucracy was involved in the difficulty, which makes the Terran Empire a not at all unlikely target for such a rant.)

It's worth noting that as recently as the mid 1990s I was encountering order entry systems in the US that couldn't deal with international addresses

And there are still plenty around that can't cope with the fact that not all countries use States or Zip codes.

Terry @ #442, I just remember doing a classic double-take when I read it. Maybe at the end the ship is named after a Filipino President or something, too? The surprise was total; I know that.