Schloss Grünfluss one year and one month later

As ever, I am bad about updating this blog. I had an idea for a "one year later" post, which would have been written on January 25th, but of course I let it pass me by. It's February 25th, so we'll settle for that. I moved into my house, in Auburn, one year and one month ago. I guess I blogged about it more like a year and half a month ago, but shut up.

Auburn has been pretty great. I've really settled in here and kind of fallen in love with the town. Corny to say, but there's a grain of truth to it (a big old corny grain). Ten years ago, I don't think I could have pictured myself saying that. But hey, cut me some slack: it's not my fault that I grew up in Kent. I was understandably biased by that experience, but now I've changed my ways. I've seen the light. Auburn is a good place to live.

I didn't really know what else to write about other than the fact that I've been living down here in the glorious nether reaches of King County for over a year. So I'll cut this one short.

Crap from Facebook: November 25th, 2019

There is, as they say in the bullshit business, "a lot to unpack here." Let's see...

The use of "snowflake" as a term of derision is different from the context of Palahniuk's line from Fight Club. In the popular political discourse of today, "snowflake" has become a demeaning term for one perceived to be too fragile, too sensitive. This invokes the ephemerality of snowflakes, their delicate structure. The quote from Fight Club isn't doing that. It goes...

You are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of the same compost heap. We're all singing, all dancing crap of the world.

 There's no emphasis on fragility in that. Instead, the focus is on uniformity and mundanity. All credit due to Chuck Palahniuk should go to him. He's a good writer and the quote has strong resonance. The book was successful and the movie based on it is a kind of cult classic or whatever. I'd happily concede that some of the recent popularity of "snowflake" as a term of derision was probably inspired by that line in Fight Club. But people using the term aren't "quoting" him. The usage is different. In fact, they're quoting the same people that Palahniuk was quoting when he wrote that line.

For decades, the term "snowflake" was applied to people, particularly children, with the emphasis being placed on uniqueness. The line in Fight Club works because the reader would have some cognizance of this older, more established usage. The character in the book, Tyler Durden, is posing a direct, scathing rejection of a classic, formulaic platitude. In the more recent usage in political discourse, rather than making a direct comparison, people are subverting the older usage by putting a new twist on an old metaphor. To put it bluntly...

-Some starry-eyed educators told a bunch of kids: "You are inherently special and unique just being who you are. Like a snowflake, you're different from every other snowflake in the universe."
-Then Tyler Durden (in a work of fiction) told a bunch of grown-ups who'd heard that message: "You are not like a snowflake. You're a lump of meat that is going to fall apart someday. And that's not special."
-Then as the term got thrown around over the next 20 years, people started using it as an insult, saying essentially, "Yeah, you know what? You really are like a snowflake: fragile and weak."

So no, mocking someone as a "snowflake" isn't quoting Fight Club.

Also, Fight Club isn't a satire. I'm not even going to waste my time with that claim. Not every book has to be a satire. Get over yourself.

Also, I'm a bit annoyed on Chuck Palahniuk's behalf that his sexuality is being brought up in this context. He only came out as gay because he believed that he was about to be outed by others. He doesn't style himself a "gay writer" or focus on gay issues. Throwing "gay" in there is irrelevant and my suspicion is that the person who wrote this crap is trying to cast everything in some kind of trite, simplistic political drama where everything is Right vs. Left. The "Right" is supposedly the side using "snowflake" as an insult and they're also supposedly the side that is anti-gay, so this person wants to mock them for "quoting" a gay man. This kind of sleazy discursive diversion really gets on my nerves, and was ultimately what motivated me to open up my blog and write about it. It's bad behavior and should be called out for what it is.

And while I'm here, Fight Club has nothing to do with fascism. Stop projecting your fantasies onto everything.

But mostly, I find it hilarious that when I went and looked at the comments on Facebook, a recurring theme was that people who tried to rebut some of this crap were generally dismissed as having only seen the movie and told that they needed to read the book. But Tyler Durden doesn't blow up any skyscrapers in the book. It's a pretty important plot point that's basically impossible to miss. So several people, including the original author of this little gem, are all advertising to anyone who's actually read Fight Club that they are pretending to have read the book, but did not actually read the book. And that's just marvelous. Right there, I have beautiful validation of why I should keep using Facebook. Where else could I find such high-grade bullshit?

And hey, let's make is a double feature. So here's some more crap...


I keep seeing posts along these lines and even though I'm used to it, I am a bit baffled anyway, perhaps because this just isn't how I was raised. My parents were/are devoutly religious, but they never wanted or expected the public school system to be part of that. I realize that a bunch of Christians got all huffy over the whole kerfuffle with Madelyn Murray O'Hair back in the 60's and 70's, but this whole thing always struck me as a no-brainer. Your local schoolteacher might have different views on religion than you do. And if not, maybe some day that could change (you won't always have the same local schoolteacher). So the more religious you are, it would seem that the more you'd want your local schoolteacher not to be involved in the religious education of your children. Ergo, this aspect of the First Amendment protects you. Q.E.D. Easy, right? Except apparently that's an unpopular view?

It strikes me as bizarre, but I guess I'm grateful that my parents weren't like this.

Oh, and people killed a whole lot of kids in schools long before 1963. So cut it out with the historical revisionism!

Singular "they"

Yeah, it's been over a month (I wrote, as I started this post, which I am getting back to after another month). I totally forgot what I was supposed to write about. Well, now I remember. And looking back, pondering the things I thought about writing when I first thought of writing this post, really, it's been longer than a month. Much, much longer.

I am not the person who should be writing this post. I say this not out of misgivings or in anticipation of any regrets. It's just a job I'd think others would be better qualified for. It's something that someone, somewhere else, should have already written. And I haven't seen it. So it falls to me. I have an amateur interest in language. Grammar is a hobby I might dabble in, but I am not an expert. And it's worth it to have an expert write this. Instead, you get me. And for that, I apologize in advance.

Much has been written regarding the singular usage of the "they" pronoun (along with its other common forms, "them" and "their"). Generally, these screeds fall into two categories.

1. Proclamations that prescriptions against the singular usage of this set of pronouns is silly, senseless, stupid, and utterly without merit. It is declared that the trend in general usage favors this and that the antediluvian snobs who protest such usage are fighting a losing battle. Eventually they'll all die and the rest of us can move on.
2. Dissertations on the longstanding historical usage of this set of pronouns. Did you know that it goes all the way back to Chaucer? Shakespeare did it too! My Grandma did it. It's already a part of the language, really. Prescriptions against it are the shrill commandments of ivory tower academic patriarchs or something. They just want to police everyone else's language. For reasons.

Both versions have sufficiently saturated the internet to the point that I'd have thought some annoyed grammar hero would have set the record straight. And if one has, it's really too bad that I've missed it. Fortunately, both versions are pretty easy to rebut. I will do so now.

1. I'm not dead yet. Also, don't be an idiot. Debates over language usage aren't settled by vague declarations about extrapolation of future trends. Yes, language does evolve. But the fact that you're bothering to call your opponents names and dubiously declaring victory on the spot is an indication that this is not, in fact, settled. You don't see people publishing articles declaring "thy" to be a dead pronoun.
2. Every essay, journal article, blog post, etc. that argues for the long-established accepted usage of singular "they" quotes the same passages from the same authors. It's like five references that get quoted by all of these people. OK, there are more, but all of them, even the Chaucer one that's so popular, display notional agreement. It is disingenuous to cite a bunch of quotes displaying notional agreement and then use that as support for your claim that a pronoun should be used without notional agreement.

You wouldn't know it from reading the crap I post in blog stuff, but I can be a grammar nerd when I want to be, and for a while I took formal writing pretty seriously. From a very young age, this sort of thing was something I was actually good at. I'm derailing this post to talk about myself, and I probably shouldn't. Oh well. As a kid in school, there were some skills I struggled with, so I took pride in the things I was good at. Usually I was the best in my class at spelling and grammar. My reading comprehension scores were off the charts. In first grade, I was tested as having a ninth-grade reading level. When I was in high school, we all took the STAR Reading test. I had the highest score out of my whole senior class. So yeah, I was that guy, I guess. I was also confident in my skills. Overconfident, actually. And when it came to this one academic subject, yeah, maybe I was a pretty bright kid. But some of the teachers had studied the subject in college, and had been teaching it for longer than I'd been alive. So there were occasions on which I boldly assumed I had everything figured out, that I was the untouchable Grammar Ace, and then I'd be informed that I was wrong. Making a little mistake didn't bother me. Never has, never does. We're human. We make mistakes. It took more than that. One of these occasions was in eighth grade, concerning the usage of the pronoun "their."

For now, let's just assume we're operating under a prescription that has "they" and its other forms as a plural pronoun. Consider the antecedent "everyone." Does it take on a plural pronoun or a singular one? In my eighth grade class, on my reading, I went with plural. I used "their." Can't remember what the whole sentence was, but it doesn't really matter. My teacher corrected me, and I was taken aback. It turns out that "everyone" is a nuanced word. I was interpreting it as synonymous with "all." But he insisted that it meant "each." The reality is, it depends on context. The word can be synonymous with either of those. If it was read as meaning "all" then "their" would have been appropriate. But if it was "each" and not "all" then it should have gotten "his or her."

I accept that one could outsnob me and insist that the "one" in "everyone" necessitates an "each" reading. My teacher did just that. But I find that this misses the point. Sometimes "everyone" really is "all." And that's where notional agreement comes in. There's probably going to be a tone-shift now because I wrote everything above this line about a month ago. I ran out of time and figured I'd get back to it soon. Well, it's later now. Or something. Look, this is just how I operate. Deal with it. I've made all of this seem highly technical, but really, it's blisteringly obvious. The proponents of singular "they" who cite Shakespeare or Chaucer or other old-timey writers as evidence of how such usage has always been part of the language must be aware of how obvious it is that the sentences they cite are not singular cases and not plural cases, but generalized cases. It happens all the time, and in fact I just did it in the previous sentence without thinking about it.

As with most linguistic rules, there are grey areas. Like dangling participles or terminal prepositions, some instances of a seemingly singular "they" would easily be parsed by any speaker or reader of English, cause for commentary only among the neurotic or the pedantic. Other instances stick out like a sore thumb. And still others are in between. That doesn't mean we throw prescriptivism out entirely! I explained the importance of prescriptivism in my previous post. I can't help but think that the educated parties advocating for all-out adoption of "they" as a singular pronoun are being disingenuous on this. They'd be aware of the confusion stemming from this usage and the irregularities involved. Even now, despite a severe push to normalize singular "they", we can't get a consensus on whether it's "themself" or "themselves." And that's because English is a natural language. It evolved. It isn't built logically and attempts to brazenly alter the structure of the language to suit some faddish sensibilities comes with consequences. For decades, the battle over singular "they" was really about just that. And really, it still is. But the other side pulled a dirty trick in recent years.

They shifted the focus of the debate to be about compassion. They took an issue of grammar and changed the subject, changed it so that the debate was about gender and gender identity. But it was never really about that. I could say more, but perhaps I've said too much already. We'll see how this unfolds.

Prescriptivism

Now that I think about it, I'm surprised that this isn't something I've already blogged. I suppose that I had reservations about it before. But now I need to! This is meant to serve as a prelude to my next post. Once that post shows up here, you'll be able to see why.

To my consternation, prescriptive linguistics seems to be popularly maligned. As a longtime prescriptivist, I've engaged in much head-shaking and protracted sighing over this matter, but I tend not to involve myself in real dialogue on the subject, which might be why I haven't taken the time to write a blog post about it.

Back in 2011, I took a descriptive linguistics course. I was delighted that the professor offered the point of clarity that descriptivism and prescriptivism are not enemies, but tools with different uses. Descriptive linguistics is based on empirical observation and objective study. It collects and analyzes information. It maps how language is used and builds systematic terminology for language. Prescriptive linguistics is based on decision-making. It uses collates known information and uses it to dispense instruction and guidance.

There is a popular, yet fatuous association of prescriptivism with a cabal of stuffy old men in ivory towers hellbent on turning English into Latin or something. The historical evidence for this is, at best, dubious. The rise of prescriptivism probably owes much more to technological innovation than anything to do with Latin. Some day I should expound on that. Perhaps I shall.

I guess that the important point I want to get at here is that prescriptive linguistics is important. In a sense, it is more important than descriptive linguistics. Descriptivism can be informative and interesting, and can even lead to practical applications. But prescriptivism streamlines communication. And it has been effective communication that has enabled and propagated these other innovations.

Prescriptivism is, or should be, concerned with clear and effective communication. I think that too many people have a negative impression of it because of how they were taught in school or because of postmodern musings that use prescriptivism as a scapegoat for real problems. I find this to be misguided. Language, especially English, is dauntingly complex. We should be keenly aware of navigating this landscape effectively. When I am speaking or when I am writing, I would hope to avoid confusing my audience or inadvertently distracting them away from the message I'm trying to send. In that endeavor, we could all use prescriptions. They serve as landmarks.

Stephen doesn't realize how crazy he looks

So I want to start this one off by noting that I'm writing this post on a whim. My updates have been sporadic for years now and, even if it seems suspiciously emphatic, I want to make it clear that nothing interesting happened today or yesterday or even this week to provide some kind of inspiration for this post. I guess it's going to seem spontaneous and I imagine that some day I'll come back  to this and wonder what was on my mind. It's not really anything timely or topical. The fact is, I guess that over the past month or so I've seen things that reminded me of things that reminded me of things and it kind of circled back around to something I should have blogged/journaled about years ago, and never did. Already I can't quite remember what train of memory-joggings brought me down this path, but here we are. Hey, at least I was motivated to post something. That's cool, right?

There's some quirk or set of quirks in the way I present myself, in the way people perceive me, which I've never been able to pinpoint, but which I can infer from remarkable trends in the reactions of others. As this here blog, and my LJ before it even moreso, might hint, I am kind of obsessively introspective. Well, you wouldn't know the half of it from just reading this crap. Because I don't dare write down the patterns of thought that really keep me occupied. Suffice to say that I am, have long always been, and probably always will be compulsively, relentlessly introspective. This paragraph is kind of getting away from me, so let's get back to this quirk or set of quirks. It took many years for me to appreciate it and I still really can't observe it in my own behavior.

I think I first noticed it in high school drama classes when I was trying to convey certain emotions in playing characters. As dabbling high school thespians go, I'd like to think I wasn't half-bad, and most signs seemed to indicate that I'd mastered certain basic skills, although of course I had a long way to go. But in certain recurring types of performances, instead of getting mostly neutral-to-positive appraisals with some mild criticism thrown in, I'd just notice weird looks. I shouldn't dance around the subject, but I don't know exactly what phrase to use. "Certain recurring types of performances" is stupidly vague. To be more specific, I mean highly animated performances in which I was doing one of two things, which I didn't and don't necessarily consider to be similar...

1. Displays of forcefulness, assertiveness, authority, including commands, demands, ultimatums, etc.
2. Displays of heightened emotion dealing with pain, rage, wrath, intense angst, generally associated with situations in which a character has been severely wronged, is in a heated confrontation, or is livid for some other reason.

I imagine there's overlap in there, but even back in high school I kind of spotted enough instances to note that it was both of these categories, either for separate reasons or due to some common element. Now, it really caught my attention in acting because I was acutely observing the reactions of my "audience" for feedback. Weird to say that now because it's not something I'd care about anymore, but at the time it was something I wanted to excel at, so I was interested in paying close attention to clues that might lead me to self-improvement. But it was never limited to stage performances or to acting of any kind. It happens in real life too. Whatever its going on here, whatever wrong signals I send out, it's not something I do accidentally because of a botched performance. I seem to provoke the same responses with both playing a character and with my real-life occurrences of these things.

When I attempt to be assertive, people get rankled by it. They appear to be mildly annoyed at first and sometimes try to work around that with various tools such as humor, misdirection, or simply walking away from me. They do not like me when I am assertive and they do not want me to continue to behave in that manner or to be around me if I do. I've seen people get visibly and disproportionately uncomfortable, even when my words aren't directed at them and when the situation wouldn't seem to call for it.

When I show outward signs of being enraged or emotionally defensive, people get very uncomfortable and seem to respond as though I'm completely unhinged. They seem to become unduly scared, harsh, or even combative, even if I'm not in a confrontation with them.

It's one thing to simply say, "Stephen doesn't realize how crazy he looks." But this is something I noticed repeatedly and, because of the acting thing in high school and continuing into college, something I experimented with, observed keenly. I compared my mannerisms to those of others, I tried to pay close attention to my inflections. I watched myself in the mirror. I even watched myself on video. Like everyone else, I don't always notice how I appear to others and how that differs from my mental image of myself. But the alarming responses I'd unwittingly invoke with those two types of behavior? I couldn't see the reasons for those. I still can't. I remain wholly and frustratingly oblivious to whatever it is that provokes these reactions in others.

At times, I've thought it comical. I've fancied that the problem isn't me: it's everyone else. It's a strange thing to know that you're showing some minor irritation but not flying off the handle, to catch yourself, rein it in and be firm, but restrained, only for everyone around you to react as though you're a maniac waving a gun around. It's even worse to be assigned some responsibility, some delegated modicum of authority at work, only for everyone in proximity to independently decide that is just not happening. "Stephen, you're in charge of this." And then everyone gets hostile.

It's certainly affected my life, although I couldn't possibly be sure how much and in what ways.

"Pro-Science" pandering

I happened across this statement on Facebook...

Most people in the Pro-Science™ crowd aren't interested in science itself, they're just interested in social signalling that they are smart and educated.

That's why they mostly focus on irrelevant lowest-common-denominator crap like flat earth and creationism.

For once, instead of a "Crap from Facebook" post, here's something I actually think has merit. It captures some stuff I've been pondering lately. There are a lot of people online, but also some I know in-person, who wear their "pro-science" on their sleeves. They're proud supporters of science and ostensibly hostile toward superstition and pseudoscience. That's not the same thing as actually having any knowledge of scientific concepts, and that's why they like to play it safe, or stay where they think it's safe.

Wait, what? A drinking straw has one hole. Everyone already knew that, right?

A while back I wrote a post about the not-so-brainteasing topic of hot dogs being referred to as sandwiches. It's silly, but the part about it that is silly to me isn't necessarily the same aspect that most people would find silly. It seems like commonly, when this topic is discussed, both sides attempt to exercise discursive techniques familiar from formal debates. They attempt to establish definitions of terms that they think will favor their own side. They refer to patterns and attempt to arrange various premises and contentions in such a way as to build a case that their side wins. It's the sort of stuff that I'd find interesting in another context, but it seems that the parties involved all forgot that they stumbled into an area where the terms exist within the context of a professional field of study, and that there is a definitive right answer. A definitive right answer, especially one that is readily available and rather clear-cut, tends to stand rather triumphantly against any kind of debate tricks, no matter how clever or sophisticated those tricks might be. So to recapitulate, hot dogs are not sandwiches because the terms "hot dog" and "sandwich" in the context of foods are terms coined by chefs, terms which exist in the context of culinary traditions. It's a rather mundane Q.E.D. to respond to some rather elaborate verbal hedging by both sides of the aisle. But then, that's how these things often work out.

To my surprise, I recently found another not-so-brainteasing question come up alongside the hotdog/sandwich topic: "How many holes does a drinking straw have?" My initial response as soon as I read that one was something like, "I think it's one, right? I mean, topology isn't really in my wheelhouse, but this is an exceedingly basic question and unless there's some trick, I know it's going to be one." And then I had the followup thought of, "Someone has probably already asked a topologist this question, so let's look it up on the internet." I was, in both instances, correct on all counts. It's an easy problem for topology, people have already asked topologists, and the answer is, indeed, one. Well, that was easy.

What's strange and frustrating to me about this, though, is that I guess I expected better. The hotdog thing seems more like a forgivable sort of mistake. The sort of people who like to argue about these things are nerds. A lot of them are into or familiar with physics, biology, epistemology, information science, etc. And perhaps the sort of nerds who are culinary nerds are also not the sort to get dragged into such arcane debates. So it becomes a topic with all sorts of irrelevant philosophical debate, because there just aren't enough people with both an interest in getting involved and the sense to remind the participants that there's already a system of nomenclature established for these things. At least, I thought that was what was going on, at the time I wrote the hotdog post. The nerds who nerd it up with elaborate discussions on abstract debate topics like "Does X count as Y" just might not have much overlap with people who are interested in culinary history. So they miss the point and look a bit silly to me, but it's the kind of mistake I guess I expected. But how many holes an object has? Surely many of these same sorts of nerds are also math nerds! Surely even the ones who don't know much topology know enough to know that it exists and know enough to look to topology for an answer. Right? Right? Apparently not.

And on that, I'm stumped. Here we have the sort of question that...

1. Seems obviously to be a topology question.
2. Has an easy, readily available answer in topology.
3. Has a definitive answer from the field of topology that also would seem to happen to match the most intuitive answer (from my perspective, anyway), so there shouldn't be much objection.

And yet some people are still arguing for a wrong conclusion? How? What's wrong with these people?