Letting Marketers Loose on Language

Language evolves. New words are coined; old words change. The end result is the rich and complex lexicon we have today. Some of this growth and change is acceptable and understandable. New words are needed as new concepts arise, as new social activities develop, and as new objects are made. But some of it arises for less acceptable reasons. Sometimes the person who coins a word - and the people who then use it - are ignorant of a word that already exists with the same meaning. Sometimes new words arise from a misunderstanding of an existing word. (Consider the modern use of the word 'showstopper' which has the opposite connotation of the word in its original meaning.) Sometimes a new word arises from laziness (e.g. when people would rather use 'text' as a verb than say, 'send a text message') sometimes from a desire to draw a strained and unwarranted analogy.

In this last category, consider how the suffix '-gate' has entered the language since 'Watergate'. In Australia in the past few weeks we've had a storm-in-a-teacup political scandal the press has dubbed 'utegate' ('ute' being a local contraction of 'utility vehicle' + '-gate' meaning a political scandal). Also consider the experiments underway at MIT to record and analyse the first three years of a child's life in order to track every utterance the child makes along with every utterance it might have heard. This has been called 'the human speechome project' by (a very strained) analogy with the human genome project. It seems that '-ome' is a new suffix which means something like 'scientific endeavour that produces an extremely large and complete data set in some field'.

It is understandable that scientists would want to associate their work with the human genome project. It isn't quite so easy to see why they would coin a word quite so ugly as 'speechome'. It is interesting to look at how we got to this sorry neologism.

The word 'genome', originally meant the 'sum total of genes in a set,' and was coined (in its German form 'genom') in 1920 by German botanist Hans Winkler. It comes from gen, short for 'gene' + om from 'chromosome.' It was Aglicised to 'genome' in 1930.

Looking back, the word 'chromosome' was coined in 1888, also by a German, anatomist Wilhelm von Waldeyer-Hartz. He constructed it from the Greek words khroma, meaning 'colour' + soma meaning 'body.' ('Colour' because chromosomes contain a substance that stains easily for microscopic viewing.)

A recent addition to this family of words is 'proteome'. This is the set of all proteins that can be expressed by an organism's genes in a particular environment, or under any circumstances (more properly the 'complete proteome'). It derives from prote(in) + (gen)ome and was coined by Marc Wilkins in 1994. Notice that the '-ome' suffix has now taken on a life of its own. It is no longer an abbreviation of 'soma' but of 'genome'. It has stared to become like '-gate', a suffix which emphasises a flattering comparison the user wishes to take advantage of, rather than one that contibutes to the interpretation of the word.

And so we come to 'speechome'. This was probably coined by marketing people at MIT within the last couple of years, simply to aggrandise the project which bears its name. Marketing people, like journalists, use language to sell things. They don't care about etymology - or indeed meaning. They have other rhetorical motives for choosing words than to educate or inform. Now that '-ome' is in the hands of marketers and journalists, expect it to move farther and farther away from the sense in which it was originally conceived.

'English Correspondence' by Janet Davey

The mechanics of getting a book from the brain of a woman living in London to a small mobile library in a tiny village in rural Australia are daunting. In many ways a metaphor for our whole global economy. The improbability, the number of unlikely choices made across a ten-thousand-mile chain of unrelated people, that put me and that particular book in that converted coach on the same day, in the same place, is disturbing to contemplate.

Yet there we were: me and 'English Correspondence' by Janet Davey.

I've been reading a lot of low-quality nonsense lately, working on understanding how such books are constructed and how their authors use language, how to please publishers of speculative fiction, trying to learn lessons that will help me get my own writing published. But there is only so much of this I can take and I needed a proper book, one that was beautifully written, one that explored character and motivation, one that treated people as more than two-dimensional, stylised, comic-book sketches, one that used words for what they are meant for - to tell, not to show. I might have picked up a book by one of the really good sci-fi writers - J.G. Ballard, or Ray Bradbury, say - but there were none available on the library bus. In fact, there was little that promised anything but shoot-'em-up adventure or hose-'em-down romance, until I found 'English Correspondence'.

Janet Davey's book - her first novel - is one in which almost nothing happens. Time passes, the heroine moves from place to place, there are conversations, but there was no 'plot' to speak of, no three-act structure culminating in an exciting shoot-out, the hero did not get the girl. Instead there were the thoughts of a woman struggling to think her way free of a life painfully unsuited to her, a woman who had made a wrong turning many years ago and who could no longer bear the consequences, whose last prop - the correspondence she maintained with her father in England - is pulled away when he dies.

The heroine is an intelligent, sensitive person who, like most people, does not have the depth of reflection, ever to understand herself and where the roots of her unhappiness lie. Instead, her thoughts skitter about on the surface of her life, trying to make sense of patterns which are mostly epiphenomena, hoping that she will reach a safe harbour by intuition or good luck. I cringed for her, as she teetered, half-blind, on the edge of yet more horrible mistakes. I hope she makes it.

The writing is intelligent, carefully crafted, occasionally witty, and just a little odd. As I read, I was wondering how to describe Davey's terse, almost staccato style when I turned a page to find she had already done it for me. She wrote of, '... her own demarcated phrases, like tidy hedging.'

'English Correspondence' was an oasis. I have been sheltering there and refreshing myself. As soon as I've written this, I will go on across the desert of my chosen genre, looking for a path to follow. It was a lovely spot and I am grateful that I stumbled across it.

On Crap

I'm a bit of a linguist, you know. Alright, I never learned to speak more than a few words of French and German and I have an awful lot of bother with all that grammar stuff, but when it comes to idle and largely uninformed speculation about words, I can't be beaten!

Take the word 'crap'.

Now, obviously, this is a very recent word, being derived from the famous Thomas Crapper, inventor of the flush toilet.

WRONG! The word is very old indeed and, in fact, has Latin roots (crappa, meaning chaff). In Old English, crappe was chaff and other rubbish trodden underfoot in a barn and eventually, in the Middle Ages, crap became a generic term for things discarded. And then it went out of use – in England. Fortunately for Hollywood, although the Brits had stopped using the word by 1600, the founders of what became the Good Ol' U.S. of A. kept it going. In fact, it became so popular over there that approximately 15% of all American writing these days is the word 'crap' or one of its derivatives.

On the Web, of course, 95% of everything your read is crap, as are most statistics, economic theories, conservative policies, and reality TV shows. Only the world's great religious texts, however, are 100% pure crap.

(The picture above is of Lauren Conrad, reality TV personality, who just announced a three-book deal with Harper. Now that makes me feel really crap.)

Nowt So Queer As Folk

In my never-ending struggle to provide a curious, interesting and strangely compelling place to visit for jaded intellectuals the world over, I am always looking for new ways to spice up this blog. One way would be to display pictures of scantily-clad men, women and animals (after all, most of my readers are human - and the rest cannot be ignored). But that is just too tacky. Another way would be to grow ever more strident until my postings consist of nothing more than streams of controversial ranting punctuated by obscenities and multiple exclamation marks. This is tempting as it is quite like my normal way of communicating. However, once I reach that point, where do I go from there? There is a limit to how big you can make your fonts (as the tabloid newspapers discovered decades ago).

I already provide cleverly-tailored advertising, provided by my good friends at Google - who have yet to pay me a single dollar for this opprotunity by the way. Not that I'm complaining. I know that, one day, someone will spot an ad that appeals and be driven to click on it. I can't wait for the day that 2c comes rolling in! Until then, you can read me railing about the wonders of science while being enticed by offers to compare your health insurance, or damning the evils of corporate granny-bashers to the accompaniment of invitations to consolidate your credit card debt. Surely this is a major incentive for you to keep coming back?

Then there is my Amazon-franchise Waving Not Drowning Media Store. (Yes, the one they're all taking about.) The only place on Earth where you can buy all the books and films that have had a good review on this blog. (I don't sell the ones that get a bad review. Trust me on this, you wouldn't want to own them. And if you did, just think of how all your intellectual snob friends would snigger when they spotted a WND reject on your book-shelf. Who needs that kind of grief?)

Even so, I have added a new and exciting feature. Yes, no-one asked for it and no-one wanted it but you got it all the same: welcome to 'Nowt So Queer As Folk', your daily round-up of all that is strange and weird in the world's news today! (It's on the right, by the way, just below the adverts.) And, yes, 'nowt' is a real word. It comes from a language called 'Yorkshire' which is still spoken in the wilder parts of Northern England. (It should also be pointed out that in 'Yorkshire' the word 'queer' means odd or peculiar and the word 'folk' is not a popular music genre - that's just for those who thought I was commenting on the sexual preferences of your favourite musicians.)

So, there it is. Enjoy. The news items are selected on the basis of the keywords listed at the top of the section. Anybody with an interesting selection of keywords to suggest may get the honour of having them used for a week following them being sent to me.

The Pathway Code - Part 1: The Basics

Following the huge success of my series on driving in Queensland, I now tackle the problem of the heavy traffic on the pavements* of our cities. This is part one of a two part series. More tomorrow.

Of course, what consenting adults do to each other in their own homes is between them and their local security agencies. It’s when they’re out in public that they need to be controlled. I’ve given up hoping that the behaviour of motorists can ever be improved. I think that most motorists just simply want to kill people and that’s all there is to it. Instead, I’d like to try to get some order into the way people on foot use our streets. That’s why I’m proposing a code of conduct for pedestrians: The Pathway Code.

The idea is simple. Using a pavement as a pedestrian may not be as lethal as using a road as a driver but it is damned irritating to be barged into, to have your way blocked and to be trodden on every time you step into the street. People just don’t seem able to control themselves or to show the kind of civility and consideration required on our busy streets. I generously assume that it’s because they are all stupid and ignorant rather than that they are deliberately malicious, so I therefore propose a set of simple rules, that even the thickest could follow, to ensure that walking through a city street becomes more like walking in the country and less like trying to make a fifty-yard run against a psychopathic rugby team.

The Basics

First we’ll tackle something simple: walking in a straight line down a straight pavement. Sadly, most pedestrians cannot manage even this. So this is how you do it:

• Walk in a straight line at a constant speed.
• Do not stop suddenly to tie your shoe laces or to ponder the meaning of Life. Do not weave from side to side like a drunk. Do not stick your arms out sideways to point out interesting sights to your friend. Do not start walking backwards for any reason.

It would probably be a good idea to mark out lanes on pavements to guide the feeble-minded and make walking in a straight line easier for them. Anyway. Having mastered this, we can go on to the other basic skills: like turning a corner. The universal rule is this:

• If you’re going to deviate from a straight line, look over your shoulder before you do to check that you’re not going to barge into somebody.

This is a deceptively simple technique but sadly lacking from most pedestrians’ repertoires. Surprisingly, it isn’t adequate on its own to prevent collisions. What is needed is an additional rule:

• If you see someone that you might collide with, or who might have to take evasive action if you turned in front of them, don’t do it.

I’m sure you’ve seen it. You’re walking along the pavement and the person in front of you decides to turn. They glance over their shoulder and see you and they can tell at once that if they turn, you’re going to fall over them. Then a look of bovine idiocy suddenly blanks over their features as their feeble brains give up the attempt to cope with this simple problem and they turn right into you.

Finally, in this section on basic rules, we must consider the one that almost everybody gets wrong: standing still. This causes endless problems and I’ve seen appaling examples of sloppy standing still as far apart as London and Los Angeles, Brisbane and Bangkok, Ottowa and Oslo. Again, the rules are straightforward.

• Only stand still where you will not be in the way.
• Do not stand still in the middle of busy streets—especially in herds of five or more. Do not stand still in doorways. Do not stand still in the middle of narrow passageways while you read your map or look in your shopping bag for your purse. Do not stand still in the entrances to subways or bus stations. Do not stand still in turnstiles, however confusing they may be—step aside while you ponder the mechanism, watch a few people go through first, then, when you’ve got the hang of it, progress straight through.

Stepping out of a shop seems to have a completely paralysing effect on many of our more intellectually challenged pedestrians. They take one step into the busy thoroughfare and then seem to be hit by instant brain death as they stand, gazing blankly about them. This has the threefold effect of causing pedestrians on the pavement to have to swerve around them, forming a small crowd of people on the pavement who are trying to get past them into the shop, and creating a blockage inside the shop of people trying to get out.

So, that's the basics. Go out and find yourself a quiet place to practice. In Part 2, we tackle the hard stuff.

(*American readers should keep in mind that the rest of the English-speaking world speaks English. In English, 'pavement' means 'sidewalk', 'road' means 'pavement' and 'shop' means 'store'. But don't worry, if you can just bear with it for a few more years, we'll all be speaking American anyway.)

A Devil's Dictionary of Web Terms

Sorry, guys, I’ve been neglecting you. Two days without a posting is quite unforgivable. My only excuse is that I have been excitedly working on the plot for my new novel and this has been obsessing me for days. However, just to show I have been thinking about you, below is an extract from a help file I have been working on to accompany this blog. I know I use a lot of technical terms and many of you are not technical folk, so I’m writing a dictionary of Web and computing terms to help you out. This lot is just the first batch. There will be more. Meanwhile, if you have any terms you would like explaining, please let me know so I can deride your ignorance in public (er, I mean include them, of course).

Back Button, n. 1. The most frequently-used button on a browser or Web page. 2. A metaphor for our whole society having clicked the wrong link somewhere along the line.

Denial of Service, adj. A type of virus attack where a huge number of infected computers (see zombie) attempt to access a website, overloading its servers. The name is inspired by the credo of the major telecoms companies (see telco).

DVD, n. The basic unit of software quality. Nothing less bloated can be taken seriously as a useful piece of software since it would fit onto a less capacious storage medium.

HTTP, n. A slow, primitive, lowest-common-denominator communications protocol on which most of the Web relies. If it got any more simplistic than this, we’d be lighting signal fires on our rooftops.

Java, n. Just another stupid programming language. Really, I don’t know what all the fuss is about. (See also Ruby, PHP, C#, etc., etc., etc..)

JavaScript, n. See Java.

Outsource, v. 1. To send jobs to poor countries where workers can be more easily exploited. 2. To provide a vital customer service in an impenetrable foreign accent.

Phishing, v. 1. Nigeria’s main export industry. 2. One of Nature’s most recent punishments for the greedy and stupid (see also lotteries and online gambling). The greedy and clever, of course, continue to go unpunished and are often found running phishing scams and/or large corporations.

Pornography, n. The main purpose for which the Internet was invented. It is a common mistake to believe that a US government research agency called DARPA funded the Internet’s development. In fact it was a Nigerian organisation called Digitally Assisted Rapid Porn Access.

Standard, n. See Microsoft. Also, any agreed format, method or protocol ignored by Microsoft.

Vista, acronym. VIrtually the Same Thing Again – only this time requiring a major hardware upgrade to run it and featuring VIRUS (Very Intrusive Redundant end-User Security).

Wireless, n. A big brown box with knobs on from which crackly, distorted music emerges (see also Windows Media Player). Also, adj., A method of networking components of a computer system such that they each interfere with one another, your digital TV, and the neighbour’s pacemaker.

YouTube, n. A dumping-ground for the outpourings of millions of wannabe pop-stars, porn-stars, actors, stand-up comics and news-readers. The distilled essence of human craving and lust for fame. The Matmos of the Web.

Zombie, n. 1. See helpdesk. 2. A re-animated corpse, mindlessly roaming the streets looking for human flesh to feed on (see salesperson). 3. A computer infected with a virus that can be directed to perform insidious and evil tasks by a third party (see Windows XP).

Careless Talk

Did you know that, when two people are in conversation with one another, they tend to align their vocabularies? Not just that but they also align their grammar. Well, they say you get to be like them you live with, but it turns out that you also get to talk like them you talk to. This is all according to some research I was reading in The Psychologist today.

It’s all very worrying, these unconscious processes that change the way we are. In fact, knowing who we are seems an almost impossible job with all this stuff going on (you know, confabulation, false memories, that kind of thing).

That’s why, having just read this research report, and being rather sensitive to what people were saying, when Wifie told me the book she was reading contained explicit, perverted sex, I paused to ask myself if ‘perverted’ was a word that I would ever use if it wasn’t for the fact that people around me use it. And whether they would ever use it if people around them weren’t using it, and so on.

I mean, just think about this word? The dictionary definitions include terms like ‘deviating from what is proper or good’, ‘bizarre’, ‘deviant’, ‘corrupted’ and ‘immoral’. Of course, a lot of people might think that ‘perverted’ sex is all those things but I don’t. What was considered perverted in my parents’ day is no longer so obviously ‘immoral’ and ‘corrupted’ – homosexuality, to take an extreme example, is now not only legal but widely accepted. Then there are things that were once unspeakable but are now quite common among ‘normal’ heterosexuals, such as mutual masturbation, role-playing, felatio, spanking, the use of sex toys, and on and on. Heavens above, it wasn’t all that long ago that the idea of a woman actually wanting lots of sex was considered morally insane. 'Perverts' like that were locked away in asylums!

The point is that we fall into the use of particular words and ideas as we attune to our social milieu, through conversation or watching the telly, yet the common, socially-constructed meanings of words, when we look closely at them, may be light-years away from what we actually believe, and from what we would feel comfortable espousing.

We need to guard against unconscious processes like vocabulary alignment in conversation not just because we might say things we don’t mean but also because me might end up believing what we say.

Taking The Lexus For A Spin

One of the reasons why it’s so hard to make a living as a writer – or any kind of artist – is that people’s standards are so low that they will read all sorts of rubbish and often think it is good.

I’m reminded of this miserable fact on reading a recent news item in Slashdot. Now, Slashdot styles itself as ‘News for nerds, stuff that matters,” so you wouldn’t expect literati to be reading it and the standard of writing is deplorably low (though no worse than most of what you find in the IT press). However, this particular piece commented positively on the writing quality of someone’s blog and it turned out that the style being lauded was of a type I hate with a passion.

Let me quote you the item in full so you can see what I mean. It was by someone calling themselves ‘kdawson’.

‘In Bruce Sterling's final column for Wired, he summarizes the output of a survey of Net prognosticators conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The piece is peppered with Sterling's trademarked stop-you-in-your-tracks imagery. An example: "The bubble-era vision of a Utopian Internet is dented and dirty... The Lexus has collided with the olive tree, and its crumpled hulk spins in a ditch as the orchard smolders."’

I hope that you, dear reader, can see what awful drivel this quote from Sterling is. In particular, the imagery is especially bad. A ‘dented and dirty’ vision? A crumpled Lexus spinning in a ditch? (Does Stirling know what a ditch is?) Why ‘hulk’ (implying age and decay)? I get the Lexus but why an ‘olive tree’ (a weak attempt to symbolise Utopia?) and why ‘orchard’ instead of ‘grove’? This is one of the worst pairs of sentences I have ever read!

Yet Stirling has been a regular online contributor to Wired magazine for a long time now and has quite a following. It’s true he says sensible things on the whole but his style is execrable. And it isn’t just him. All over the Web and even in print, people write horrible stuff like this, using imagery that is inappropriate, inconsistent, misleading and silly. Striking, ‘stop-you-in-your-tracks’ imagery is great when it works but these days, instead of dazzling you with the brilliant light of revelation, it leaves you feeling like you’ve walked into a soggy curtain of wet wool.

Dumber and Dumber

You know, Dolly Parton once said, ‘Never watch anything dumber than you are.’ It’s pretty good advice, although very hard to achieve considering the state of modern film and television. It’s even hard to apply to reading these days. The editorial standards of most newspapers have slipped below the point where they irritate one beyond endurance, magazines are worse, and as for books! Well, let’s face it, most of them are written by people who are only barely literate and edited by people who are hardly better. Worst of all, of course, are advertisements. Mind you, writing advertising copy is probably the kind of job you can only do if you don’t have the intelligence to realize what blight on civilization you have become. The literacy of most advertising ranks just a step or two above text messages, somewhere below emails and blogs.

Partly, it’s a failure of intelligence. Let’s face it, spelling and grammar are just too hard for most people. But it is also a failure of education. I’ve known some reasonably bright people who were pathetically unable to string two words together. Partly it’s the fault of the Americans. Their attempt to ‘simplify’ spelling many years ago has left them with a semi-phonetic spelling system which has thrown away most of our language’s etymology, making it impossible for American children to learn spelling by understanding the linguistic and historical roots of words. It was a mistake on a global scale since they now export their impoverished version of English to the world and drone countries like Australia parrot American as if it were their own language.

Yet there’s something much more serious going on. There’s a tendency for people – even professional writers – not to care about expressing themselves correctly. They don’t think that they need to worry about precision because people will know what they mean. They communicate without care. In itself, not so bad, but if people are not trying clearly to express what they mean, my suspicion is that they are not trying hard to be clear about what they mean, that their thinking itself is sloppy and careless. And it certainly seems to be the case.

As a very minor example of this very significant problem, consider plurals. People today have enormous difficulty with plurality. They cannot distinguish phenomenon from phenomena, fewer from less, and words like fora and schemata are almost gone from the language. Worse than these (which, after all, are probably just laziness) is the inability to use collective nouns as singular (the crowd are chanting, everybody who lives here are poor) and to use the names of singular entities as plurals (Manchester United are pleased with the result, the Government are voting on the bill, Microsoft are releasing Vista in January). These examples are not just sloppiness with language but sloppiness of thought – the inability to distinguish a collective entity from its members.

Even in something so apparently trivial, can be traced our first steps on the slippery slope to losing all the hard-won benefits of civilization and universal education. If we let our language fall into ruin, we let our ability to think clearly fall with it.

What’s The Point of Talking?

There is much lofty talk about how the power of speech separates us from the lower animals. Next time you take your seat on a number 47 bus, listen to the chatter around you. I bet you won’t hear a single noble sentiment or even one priceless scientific truth. Our lives are filled with a ceaseless babble of pleasantries and gossip, idle remarks and clichés. We do it face-to-face, by telephone, by letter and by e-mail. We even turn on our radios and TVs to hear others doing it in soaps, chat shows and reality TV. So why do people spend so much of our time in seemingly pointless communication?

In the animal world there is a lot of chatter too. Open your window and listen to the birds singing if you need convincing. Animal studies show that the utterances animals make generally carry very simple messages. Things like: Here I am! Does anyone fancy sex with me? Look out everybody, danger’s coming! I’m OK, I’m one of you! The food’s over there! It’s quite an impressive repertoire when you look at it but the question is: do these animals actually intend their communications, or is each simply an inevitable reflex triggered by circumstances?

It is possible that chimpanzees at least really do know what they’re doing when they communicate. Experiments have been going on for decades to try to teach chimps to speak. Unfortunately they don’t have the vocal chords for it, so researchers teach them to use sign language or to build up sentences using plastic symbol shapes. One chimp called Washoe was taught to use sign language. The researchers claimed that, not only could Washoe ask for things and express its feelings but it could even make jokes! Dolphin studies have produced evidence suggestive of even more sophisticated language use. Yet, even if all this evidence proves to be well founded, chimp and dolphin language would still be far cruder than our own.

Yet people don’t use their gift just for worthy, noble purposes. For every “Origin of Species” or “Principia Mathematica” that is published, there are mountains of women’s magazines and romantic novels. It seems, looking at the numerical evidence, that chit-chat is the primary purpose of human communication. For instance, in a study of electronic mail messages in one large organisation, it was found that about 80% of messages were casual, social interactions and only 20% were work related.

Yet this is not necessarily a bad thing. Some linguists suggest that the reason language evolved in the first place was just so that we could socialize with each other. We are, after all, merely another species of primate. Genetically, we are 98% similar to chimps and gorillas. Like our hairy cousins, we are social animals. What do apes do in their spare time? They groom each other. They pick fleas out of each others’ fur and straighten it and stroke it. It is an activity that strengthens the bonds of trust and friendship within the troop. What do people do? We chat. We engage in a kind of linguistic grooming. And it’s very efficient too. The average size of a primate troop is about 30 individuals. Primitive human societies average just under 150. The belief is that it is through language that we can maintain such large groupings and bigger groups mean better chances of survival. It doesn’t keep our pelts clean but, as with chimpanzee grooming, it serves to keep our societies together. It binds us to each other and it creates the social cohesion that makes human life possible. Idle chat is perhaps the most socially valuable activity that most of us ever engage in.