My Heart Quails ...

"Making an Arguement for Misspelling -- TIME magazine, 8/12/2008" I agree that English spelling rules are convoluted and illogical, as are many of its sentence constructions and grammatical structures. And yet ... and yet ... there's something so terribly disheartening about the idea of just, I don't know, giving up on learning to spell correctly. It's one thing to choose to reject a set of rules because you have undertaken the task of following them and acknowledge that they're broken; it's another to throw up your hands and decide that trying is too hard. An Economist sidebar on this same subject, which advocates "updating" rather than "scrapping" the rules, briefly explains five reasons why written English is so wonky. Which is cool! Cuz while I knew about or of some of these things, and that English is wonky, I'd never put them together before. 1. It's partly Germanic and partly Latin in origin 2. The aural Great Vowel Shift in the 15/16th centuries left written words as they were, but changed the pronunciation. (I learned about the GVS in a linguistics class. I love that this event actually occurred and is referred to in title case.) 3. Early printing presses were staffed by non-English speakers, who muddled things up further 4. There was at some point a move to attempt to align English words with Latin roots, even though the words weren't originally derived from Latin, leading to extraneous "silent" letters 5. There's never been a centralized English "authority" capable of enforcing standardization, unlike (apparently) French and Spanish Sigh. Guess we'll have to rely on Webster's for our central spelling authority ... for as long as that lasts.

Dear New Yorkers & Tourists, Please Learn How to Ride the Subway

Okay, so living in New York, you take the subway everywhere. And I like it, I really do. I like the fact that it runs 24/7 (even though there are always strange, unplanned, and unexplained detours and re-routes on weekends & holidays); I like the fact that I can get 95% of my monthly transportation needs taken care of on $81 a month (and possibly with an occasional freebie!); I like that I don’t have to deal with car insurance or maintenance or parking. I like the fact that living car-free gives me the luxury to say (and believe) sort-of-pompous things like “I think rising gas prices are a good thing since economic inviability of maintaining a gas-power-based economy is the only thing that will ever push us as a nation to seriously invest in alternative energy research,” the first part of which I doubt I would say if I actually had to fill up a tank every week. I really, really love the fact that I'm free to ride home drunk as, say, Diana Barry after several tumblersful of “raspberry cordial” (which happens quite frequently), without fear of killing myself or someone else. But what I Do Not Love is freaking other people. Who don't know how to put the communal property that is the subway to our collective good use. You know who you are. Let me educate you.

How To Ride the Subway In a Manner That Does Not Violate the Social Contract

1. Move to the center.

2. Out-of-towners, don’t let your children sit on the floor during rush hour. A) The floors are gross. B) It is way too crowded for your princesses to lounge at their leisure. C) It is too gd early in the morning for me to think about this. You are annoying.

3. Don’t hook your elbow (or, god forbid, your knee) around the center pole. You’ll inevitably fold your arm close to your body, and thus smush your body to the pole, and the next thing I know you are twined around it like the car is a back room at Gallagher’s 2000 and the strobes and music are about to start. I need something to grab onto, and I can’t if your body is draped over 98% of the pole. Women, this is especially true for you. I will get my hands on part of that pole, and since I’m 5’5” chances are that your boobs are smushed against it somewhere in the vicinity of where my hand needs to be. I am completely capable of standing, stone-faced, through an entire ride where your sideboob brushes against my knuckles if you are not capable of picking up the body-language hint and standing back a bit. You are annoying.

4. Uncross your legs if it’s rush hour to save room. Seriously, I’m glad you scored a seat. Now can I have four inches of floor space to step forward a little bit, or are you really that intent on bringing me and the dude behind me into carnal relations?

5. Do not spit on the floor. Or drop your sunflower seed shells on the floor. Do. Not.

6. Move to the center.

7. Don’t read, Blackberry, PS2, or anything else on your way out of the subway cars or up the stairs. I am a huge proponent of reading. I have been known to go hours without sleep to finish a book. I even gave it up for Lent once as a sacrifice to God, back when I was serious about God, because I love it that much. But nothing you are reading can be that important. Make your way up the stairs at a reasonable pace, exit the station, and resume reading later.

8. Don’t stop at the top of the stairs or directly outside them. I don’t care if it’s raining. Move three feet out and to the side before you start digging around in your giant, ugly Vera Bradley tote bag for your expensive, ugly Burberry umbrella. You can do it.

9. Don’t stop directly in front of the single turnstile to find your Metrocard. You are annoying.

10. Don’t go up the “down” side of the stairs if you are going to go at the speed of molasses in winter. The left side of the stairwell is like the oncoming-traffic lane on a dotted-line, two-lane country road. You’re allowed to shoot into it, rev up to pass a slower motorist, and scoot back into your lane on the right. What you are not allowed to do is wander into it and hang out there til the road runs out. If you do this, a semi is going to come roaring down and you will have a five-passenger pileup and it will not be pretty. You're probably a tourist, so you probably have a car, so you should understand this analogy.

11. Do not try to flirt with me on the morning commute. I’m tired, hot, and touching way too many other people simultaneously. All I want to do is be back in bed (without you). In fact, the entire train is also wishing to be back in bed, and therefore it is veerrry quiet, and therefore everyone can hear every pathetic double entendre and attempted sexual riposte you’re making. It is awkward. You are not sexy. You are annoying.

12. Move. To. The. GD. Center. That about covers it, I think.

Hearts, me

My Perfect Day

This weekend my friends and I started talking about what each of our perfect days would be. (This is assuming you were by yourself, not that your friends were pushed into another room having fun without you somewhere.) My perfect day includes: 1. Lying in my comfy bed, with freshly-laid clean sheets 2. With a pile of unread books that I knew were good, like maybe the end of a series I'd been waiting for or a book from a beloved author who hadn't published in a few years 3. And it would be late fall, and the sunlight would come through leaves and dapple on my covers, and the breeze would come through the open window 4. Maggie would be next to me, just lying furry and sweet against my leg like she used to 5. As would a box of fresh-baked cookies, which she would beg for but I would not give because chocolate contains theobromine which is bad for doggies 6. And it would be the Friday beginning a long weekend, so I would know I have plenty of time. There might be some mugs of coffee in there somewhere, too. And that would be my perfect day.

Ah, What the Hell, A Couple More Awesome Things!

Another word cloud! Of this blog. Woot woot! Click for bigger! I don't know why "one" is showing up so prominently (nor "God," come to think of it) but I think the fact that "like" enjoys the same prominence here as it did in my earlier word cloud ought to say something about my use of the English language. Also, another couple of fantastic poems. These are both by Yeats, who you don't need me to tell you was a master. Despite being from an Anglo-Irish family in the 1860s ... uh okay, quick detour for a history lesson: Ireland was still under British colonial rule in the late 1800s (til 1921, actually), and England, being Protestant, had for several centuries enforced laws barring Roman Catholics from positions of power. Thus most of the ruling/wealthy/upper classes of Irish society were Protestant (and of originally British descent); they were called the Anglo-Irish and were viewed by much of Ireland as the enemy in much of the Home Rule movement (i.e., the movement for a separate Irish republic) troubles to follow. Anyway. So despite being from a wealthy Anglo-Irish family, Yeats was extremely involved in the Irish Literary Revival in the fin de siecle, which was concerned with reclaiming "Irish identity" in the form of the Gaelic tongue and Celtic mythology (of which, by the way, he knew none. He would mispronounce the name of Ireland's greatest mythological hero, Cuchulain, for like 8 years before somebody corrected him). Much of his early work is deeply concerned with Irish identity: the reclamation of Irish legend (any of his Cuchulain or faerie host poems; "The Rose of the World," etc), the terrible events of Irish colonial history (possibly his most famous poem, "Easter 1916," is about the Easter Rising against the English), and his own distraught and distressing relationship with the famous Maude Gonne, an actress and fellow Revivalist (he pined after her for like 30 years, and proposed multiple times to both her ... and her daughter. Ew). A lot of his stuff from this time period is basically impossible to understand without knowing the context of Irish history and myth, and a lot of it is ... well, in very vaulted, perhaps overblown language. The power of some of it is impossible to deny, though, even if you don't quite understand it (like "Easter 1916," "The Song of Wandering Aegnus," "Leda and the Swan," "The Circus Animals' Desertion," and the intense, disturbing "Second Coming," among others). BUT. In his later years, he produced many poems which are shorter and less elaborate, and which speak to what are perhaps more universal human truths: determination and triumph; longing and regret and sorrow; the bitterness of experience and the sweet naivete of youthful hope. Here are two of my favorites. Two Years Later Has no one said those daring Kind eyes should be more learn'd? Or warned you how despairing The moths are when they are burned? I could have warned you; but you are young, So we speak a different tongue. O you will take whatever's offered And dream that all the world's a friend, Suffer as your mother suffered, Be as broken in the end. But I am old and you are young, And I speak a barbarous tongue. To a Friend whose Work has come to Nothing Now all the truth is out Be secret and take defeat From any brazen throat, For how can you compete, Being honor-bred, with one Who, were it known he lies, Were neither shamed in his own Nor in his neighbours' eyes? Bred to a harder thing Than Triumph, turn away And like a laughing string Whereon mad fingers play Amid a place of stone, Be secret, and exult: Because of all things known That is most difficult.

Two Awesome Things

Okay, so you know the Harry Potter Ballad contest that Amazon.com was putting on? (No? Basically they asked for 250-words-or-less “ballads,” or pieces of prose, expressing your … love, obsession, joy, whatever, of Harry Potter. The prize was, you got to fly to London and spend a weekend with the precious Tales of Beedle the Bard book. One imagines there was more to it than that, but that’s what I remember). ANYway. So I just read the winning ballad in the 18-and-under age group, and I really liked it because I love Harry Potter, and this sixteen-year-old from Australia wrote it, and I’m PMSing so the love of HP + books + growing up brings tears to my eyes; ergo I am reposting it here:

When I was six, he was eleven
I learnt how to be brave.

When I was seven, he was twelve
I learnt to misbehave.

When I was eight, he was thirteen
He taught me how to cry.

When I was nine, he was fourteen
He showed me how to try.

When I was twelve, and he fifteen
He taught me to forgive.

When we were fourteen and sixteen
I learnt what it was to live.

When we were fifteen and seventeen
He showed me he could bleed.

But growing up with Harry taught me, mostly, how to read.

Isn’t it great! Young people growing up with Harry and learning to love reading! Sigh.

Secondly, and GREATER: I found this really awesome site/application called Wordle. Wordle makes “word clouds” out of text you enter, or URLs, etc, basing the size of the word on the frequency of its appearance in the text, and sifting out articles and other overly-common words. You can customize the font, color, and basic layout. Here’s one, based on an (extremely representative) chain of workday emails between my friends and I. (Click for larger, clearer picture.)

I think the visualization of information is a really interesting topic—for instance, did you know there wasn’t really such a thing as a graph in the Western world until Florence Nightingale? There was this awesome article in the Economist a few issues back about the emergence of visually organized data, and they talked about her apparent comfort with statistics as well as nursing. At the time, people didn’t really correlate hygiene and/or cleanliness with infection and disease. She made this strange, circular graph of the deaths of soldiers in the Crimean war below, "Diagram of the Causes of Mortality in the Army in the East" (click for larger scale), showing the percentage of soldiers who died of wounds, of infectious or “preventable” diseases, and of unquantifiable “other” causes. The round, snail-like visual seems like a strange way to present information to us—we’re used to seeing the horizontal x-axis as a measure of time, and it seems weird & counterintuitive that she loops it around a circle because then she has to jump to another circle to show the next year—but by using different colors and making the slices of the graph proportional to the number of deaths, you can still see without sifting through a billion numbers that deaths by infectious disease far outweigh other types of death, even when the fighting was heavy (you can see this in October & November of 1854 or June of 1855 by how large the red “died of wounds” color block is). This graph was successful in helping her get barrack and hospital conditions improved.

Anyway, I think it’s just an interesting thing. Seeing information visually displayed can be really impactful, in ways that looking at long lists of words or tables of numbers cannot be. Which brings us back to Wordle. Look at the word cloud above and notice the proliferation (and relative weight) of words such as: like, just, and omg (we are obviously very literate people); depressed, sob, dyyyiiiiiiiing, hate, work, torture, freaking, death, etc. And food words: burger, chocolate, hungry. Now you don’t have to read the chain to get the relative importance of things to us. Obviously we need to lighten up. And eat.