My Unpublished Works 2

TWGLCM (pron. twiggle-kim) [Acronyms 02; PhD Ideas 02]

2011-11-06T09:54:00.000-08:00

TWGLCM (pron. twiggle-kim) stands for Tall White Good-Looking Christian Male. TWGLCMs are given the benefit of the doubt as to their intelligence, competence and trustworthiness. Yes, even by me. I flatter myself that I detect smarts and sense only from real evidence, but I have to admit that I am slow to conclude that a person is a fool and a flake if he is a TWGLCM.*

Change a single adjective in TWGLCM and the favorable presumption decreases quite a bit. If a man is short instead of tall; black instead of white; pleasant-looking rather than good-looking; Muslim, Hindu or Jewish instead of Christian, he will have to try harder to appear smart, reliable and honest. Change two adjectives and the man might as well be a woman. That is, change the noun from male to female, and, the presumption is almost entirely rebutted.

A woman who is TWGLC (twigglic), rather than, say, SBFLM (short black funny-looking Muslim), has a far better chance of being judged based on who she is and what she does and does not do, but she's still she. Without the right adjectives, the negative presumptions -- stupidity, incompetence, untrustworthiness -- will apply until there is overwhelming contrary evidence (or forever, despite it). Move one of the first three variables (height, skin color and looks) to the middle range, and the woman's odds improve a little. Switch three of SBFLM to the TWGLC set, and baby, you're on your way to being evaluated on your merits, almost.

I say this having examined my own reactions, as well as those of everyone around me. It does not matter that the observer has few of the adjectives in his favor, or not even the noun in her favor. I myself am a SWFLJF. The problem is that few of us can escape what we've absorbed unconsciously throughout our lives, in our schools and communities and from the media, old or new. Of course, sometimes not being entirely TWGLC can work for a man: Ross Perot may have done better in the 1992 election because he was short and funny-looking, but then his platform was that he was different.

***

The reason this post is in the PhD Ideas series as well as the Acronym series is this: PhD candidates and tenure-track scholars in social psychology could test the TWGLCM hypothesis. The subjects need not be Americans or Westerners, either. Just substitute the majority religion for the C. Otherwise, the letters should stay except perhaps for the W which could be LS (light shade). A future post will consider Shadism (pron. shade-ism) and how it appears to affect people of all shades, whether they are in a mixed society or not, and regardless of northern European (that is, very light shade) domination, influence or even presence.

If you know of any past experiments into TWGLCM prejudices, please let me know. If you decide to do one yourself, please let me know that, too. Thanks!

*I invented TWGLCM around 1995 after struggling to comprehend the poor performance of a TWGLCM student. Ever since then, I have used the acronym occasionally in conversation and emails. This written version was first drafted in 2010. - RJM

Now Boarding (Air Travel 01; Head-Smack 01)

2011-11-06T08:32:00.000-08:00

Programmable displays at airport gates are wonderful, whether they are the new flat panels or the old dot matrix signs. Boarding by zones is also wonderful. Let's put these ideas together.

When it comes time for boarding, the gate agents should be able to change the display so that it shows what zone is boarding. Some airlines do this, but only in small print at the bottom of the display and/or intermittently with other information such as advertisements, the weather, or upgrade lists.

Does anyone in charge of gate signage actually fly? Or do they all have super-premiere status, so they never have to worry about boarding by zones?

When the plane is boarding, it's too late to worry about whether you have an upgrade. You probably know that already. Anyway, it is an individual concern, irrelevant to the other 250 people taking the flight. They do, however, care about boarding the plane.

Head-smack Idea: Once boarding begins, the display behind the agent's desk and the one hanging from the ceiling should both show, in the biggest possible font, the four things that matter right then:

the flight number,
the destination,
the departure time, and
THE ZONE THAT IS BOARDING.

With the press of a button, the gate agent should be able to change to this display as soon as ne announces that boarding will begin. Each time another zone is permitted to board, pressing the button should update the display. The button could be the same one that operates the loudspeaker. After all, the audio has problems. The announcements are often unintelligible; they may be incomprehensible to anyone from another country or another region of the United States; and they don’t help at all if you walk up to the gate after they are made.

True, the lack of decent signage fosters camaraderie among travelers. Friendly conversations begin “Did you understand that?” and “What zone are they up to?” But it also encourages people to jump the queue, either intentionally or not, which wastes time and can cause embarrassment and anger.

If you read this and smack your head – or say “I’ve always thought the same thing” – but can do nothing because you are not in charge of airport signage, I hope that from you to someone who is in charge is only one degree of separation.

drafted 5/22/10

finally posted, because the same problem still exists, 11/6/11

Mail voting, Oregon, and coercion in the family [Voting 02, PhD Ideas 01]

2011-11-04T09:12:00.000-07:00

In my post on Mail/internet voting v. the secret ballot [Voting 01], I discussed my concern about replacing voting booths with mail/internet voting.

What worries me is a species of what might be termed false completion. I am thinking specifically about a subspecies of such fraud, the kind that can occur within a household when people vote by mail (VBM). When voters go to physical polling places and vote secretly at private voting machines, this kind of fraud is rarely possible. With VBM it becomes much easier.

There are two obvious varieties of false completion within a household: coercion and usurpation.

False completion by coercion occurs when voter X is intimidated by person Y in the household to mark the ballot in accordance with the preferences of Y not shared by X.
False completion by usurpation occurs when voter X's rights are nullified because person Y in the household takes the ballot away from X and completes it according to Y's choices, choices different from X's.

I know that for the last several years the state of Oregon has required all ballots to be mailed. I wondered whether Oregon had been concerned at all with false completion within households. Or whether scholars generally have considered this problem. What I found suggested that the problem of household coercion/usurpation is given lip service at best and has never been studied.

In a 2005 report on the Oregon experience by The Early Voting Center at Reed College, neither the word "secret" nor the phrase "secret ballot"is mentioned. The report makes passing reference to coercion as the third of three security issues, but does not follow up. The Center's website, visited today, is full of interesting information and thoughtful analysis. Neither "coercion" nor "family," however, net any hits.

The Wikipedia entry on postal voting, viewed today, also refers to coercion as a possible issue but then ignores it.

The security issues that do receive attention are various kinds of fraud, in particular false ballot completion and false registration. Nobody seems to worry about false completion within a household. Rather, the imagined situation seems to be wide-scale voter tampering: fraud by strangers to the particular voters. For example, party X operatives might intentionally intercept ballots addressed to people registered with party Y and would then vote those ballots for party X's line. That is something to protect against, and there are ways to detect it, at least after the fact For example, some of the Ys will complain that they did not get a ballot and will report the theft when they discover that their ballot has already been submitted. False completion within a household is much more insidious but could equally result in disenfranchisement and could skew election results.

I agree that it would be difficult to collect data on the percentage of citizens who did not vote their true choice because someone in their family was standing over them or grabbed the ballot out of their hands. That information, unlike turn-out and other data that more readily pop out of computers, might have to be gathered by personal surveys undertaken in a setting where the possibly-intimidated voter was not intimidated -- so not door-to-door. That would not be a cheap or easy study.

But maybe there is a way to learn about false completion within households that could be done with what I jokingly call RISC architecture (a play on the real computer science term RISC architecture). Here are some suggestions, in case anyone is working on a PhD on voting rights. Or family dynamics.

Ways to Use Data-mining to Study False Completion in Households by Data-mining

Select a past election where an age or gender gap was predicted by pre-election polling. The vote can be for a candidate or a ballot measure, as long as some kind of demographic gap, one that would occur within households, was expected.

Gaps along the lines of race, ethnicity, or income, where all members of a household would likely be in the same group, could be a good control, but would not themselves reveal anything about false completion within households.

In hybrid-voting states, where there are physical polls as well as the option to vote by mail, the study would look at whether the gap among voters who cast their ballots secretly at physical polls was statistically different from the gap among VBM voters.

In mail-only (or mail/internet-only) elections, the study could look at the whether the gap was statistically different for single-person households compared to multiple-person households. For example, if an age gap was predicted, the study might look at seniors living alone v. seniors living with relatives. (Seniors living in assisted living facilities might also be subject to more widescale coercion/usurpation, but that would be a form of false completion by strangers rather than within households.)

Another study might compare measures/candidates on a single ballot, some for which a gap was expected, and some not, and then compare VBM voters and true secret ballot (private voting machine) voters.

Yet another might look at household solidarity (all voters in one household voting alike on every ballot choice) of VBM households versus physical poll households. That could be done in Oregon, comparing patterns before the switch to mail-only with those after the switch. It would, however, mean that the researchers would have to see voting data associated with addresses. That might be impossible due to privacy concerns, even for historical data. But maybe there would be a way to safeguard privacy by having the software do the seeing and having the humans only learn aggregate results? Anyway, it's a thought.

***

If such studies already exist, please let me know. If you embark on such a study, please let me know that, too!

11/4/11 rjm

rev 11/6/11

Mail/internet voting v. the secret ballot [Voting 01]

2011-11-03T23:31:00.000-07:00

Voting by mail has surprisingly few critics. I want to change that before neighborhood polling places disappear forever.

When people vote in voting booths, they can disagree with powerful members of their households -- a spouse, sibling, parent, child, caregiver, etc. -- and it is nobody's business but their own. That is the beauty of the secret ballot. People can say they voted for the family favorite, but they don't have to do it.

When, however, ballots must be completed at home -- the usual image is that everyone sits around the kitchen table and says, 'Who did you choose for dog catcher?' -- the opportunity to vote independently may be severely compromised. Maybe not in my household or yours, but definitely in some. Once voting by mail or the internet becomes the only way to vote, that problem could become serious.

What about in Oregon, where for several years now voting by mail (VBM) has been the only way to vote? Well, nobody knows, because as far as I can tell nobody ever thought to find out. See next post about VBM, coercion, and an idea for some research.

Consider also some of the countries to which we hope to export democracy, countries where restrictions on women's rights still exist. In Saudi Arabia, for example, the King recently announced that women will finally have the right to vote starting in 2015. They still can't drive a car, however. I hope that in 2015 there are private voting booths at polling places that are within walking distance of home. Otherwise, the women's right to vote may have little substance left.

Would web-voting be better than VBM? Probably not. Maybe people can vote on their own computers without anyone else looking over their shoulders, but maybe not. If they get away with it this time, they may not be so lucky, or so fearless, next time.

Sure, some household powerfuls will appreciate that the secret ballot is important to our democracy and they will affirmatively want the rest of the family to think independently. But some will think they have a right to control behavior, including thinking and voting, because they provide food, clothing and shelter. Without the safety of a publicly-provided, privacy-insured voting booth, their wishes can become, quite literally, law.

Instead of one person, one vote, we will have one household, multiple votes. And some in our society will be disenfranchised.

Who we elect will be affected, too. The recipients of these unwilling votes are more likely to have greater respect for power than for democracy, and less fear of despotism than of the will of the people.

I understand that providing physical polling sites is expensive, and that mail/web voting helps local governments save money. That's finance. That's not our national values. One person, one independent vote, is something we thought we treasured. We could be in the process of relinquishing it. And other countries, importing our kind of democracy, may end up with an inferior substitute.

We need to protect the secret ballot. That means making sure it can be kept secret. From big brother, not just Big Brother.

11/3/11 rjm

rev 11/6/11

Andy Borowitz, Tracy Klugian and Harland Dorinson

2011-09-11T15:23:00.000-07:00

For a couple of years now I've subscribed to The Borowitz Report and I am a big fan. I also have a good memory for names, which could be why I noticed that Borowitz recycles them. Very often he attributes quotes from spokesmen, men on the street, or experts to either Harland Dorinson or Tracy Klugian. Also, Davis Logsdon, as I discovered writing this blog. And there may be others. By the way, Tracy is always "he," as far as I can tell, although Tracy can be a woman's name, too. As to the use of "he," Mr. B. should read NE-NER-NIS to learn how easily he could avoid choosing a sex for ambiguously-named persons.
          Nowhere on the web could I find a mention of the ubiquity of Klugian and Dorinson. This leaves me wondering whether they are completely fictitious or just (un)lucky enough to be associated with so many different statements and fields. They also grow old and young and old again at Andy's fancy: he always
mentions the ages of his people on the street. And yes, they are almost always men* unless the story particularly requires a woman speaker.
           Charities often auction the right to name a character in a book. Jane Smiley mentioned at a reading from Private Life at the University of Iowa last summer that this was how she had chosen the name for one of her characters. (The book is, by the way, deep and profound, with remarkable insights about life and relationships. It tells the story of the apparently simple, mostly bland life of a woman whose experiences are not what anyone would immortalize in a movie. They are just what really happens.)
           Thus the question is: are Tracy Klugian and Harland Dorinson real people who have obtained the right to be in The Borowitz Report by donating to Andy's favorite charity, or are they names he made up, perhaps after making sure that there were no such real people at least as far as Google and Facebook revealed? I checked this myself today.
Google: Based on the first two pages of hits, Tracy Klugian is only found in Borowitz Reports. I thought I'd found Harland Dorinson somewhere else, but it was in a politically conservative (as self-described) blog that copied a Borowitz piece verbatim but without attribution. I won't link to it because I have a serious problem with lack of attribution, but here is the link for the original piece by Borowitz, from 2008, "Recession Resulting in Crappiest Presents Ever". Reading it brought the name Davis Logsdon to my attention. I thought I'd seen it recently. Sure enough, Davis also appears frequently.
Facebook: Facebook has no entries for Tracy K nor Harland D although facebook's bing search shows a zoominfo entry for a Tracy Klugian, spokesman for Ohio Art. That's one of Borowitz's jokes.
           To begin to appreciate how often Andy has used these names, search The Borowitz Report website. This link is for Tracy Klugian.
           Do other names recur on the Borowitz Report? Now I'll be on the lookout. And if you notice any, please let me know.

*It is rare that Borowitz quotes a fictitious female. I tried searching his site for "she." Alas, you can't include a blank after the word, so you get a hit every time he mentions that prices have been slaSHEd on his book. You also get hits for fictitious quotes from real females. But fictitious females? Few inhabit Andy's fictional world. Hence the answer to the riddle, how is Borowitz like the film industry in general and Pixar in particular? For more on that, see my explanation for why I was down on Up (the movie) and how disappointed I was that Kathryn Bigelow's Oscar was for an otherwise all-male production.

Acronyms 01: WIBOTT (pron. why-bott)

2011-04-26T11:00:00.000-07:00

For years, I used the term "pre-med" as shorthand to describe someone with no intellectual curiosity whatsoever, someone who only ever wanted to get the job done and never cared about getting right. Of course, sometimes getting it done is more important. And of course number 2, sometimes focusing on getting it right means it never gets done, which can be a disaster. But the best people are those who instinctively make a judgment about where on the 'done/done right' continuum each task ought to be and then get it done with the appropriate amount of attention to getting it right.

Sometimes I would refer to someone with the "get it done and be done with it" mentality as an "inbox-to-outbox" type. This was in honor of a fellow associate at a law firm, who, according to another associate, was well-regarded by the partnership because ne moved things from nis inbox to nis outbox promptly and reliably. Quality, or its lack, my informant added, was of little importance to our employers. But "inbox-to-outbox" is cumbersome, and its meaning may not be patently obvious.

The term "pre-med" gave me pause, too, because I know quite a few post-pre-meds (that is, practicing medical doctors) who do try to get it right whenever possible, people whose intellectual curiosity and
integrity are of the best. And I realized they could rightly be insulted at my prejudiced and insulting view of pre-meds, who are definitely not created equal when it comes to mental outlook.

A few months ago I pondered this problem again because I encountered some non-pre-meds who were inbox-to-outbox types. A solution popped into mind. I could call them by the acronym WIBOTT (pronounced why-bott), for "Will It Be On The Test," an often-heard question from pre-meds in, say, their required physics course. The acronym, I hope, is not only fairer than "pre-med" but is also more self-explanatory, referring directly to the attitude of WIBOTTs toward new information and their lack of eagerness to indulge in that pastime known as thinking.

This is not my first acronym. Later in this series I will write about some others I have coined over the years. I am starting with WIBOTT only because it has received such a good response. I expect that some to whom I have mentioned it, non-WIBOTTs of course, are already spreading the word (literally).

[rev 1. 4/28/11. rev. 2 9/10/11.]

Nature/Nurture 01 and Teaching 01: The Lima Bean Effect

2011-01-04T15:28:00.000-08:00

The Lima Bean Effect, or Why You Should Like in advance of Actually Liking

When I was a little kid, I ate everything. I used to think that this was because I was such an obedient child, intensely aware of what my mother didn't like and earnestly eager to please. My mother had nothing but contempt for picky eaters, or rather for the mothers of picky eaters. In her view, children naturally loved all foods and only expressed dislikes to manipulate their parents. Over the years, I've realized she was wrong. People's taste buds vary, like their hair color or the length of their limbs, even relative to other limbs. (Some people really do have short arms and long legs, and it's not because their mothers made them run for everything and would never accept a hug.)

The fact is that I and my mother are blessed with good tongues: we are less sensitive to bitter tastes and probably more sensitive to sweetness. Maybe we are also more tolerant of variations in texture. My daughter is equally lucky. But she has a friend who won't eat fruit and dislikes almost all vegetables. I can see rejecting romaine, but strawberries with sugar? Something hard-wired in this girl’s tasting apparatus must be involved, especially if the only vegetable she'll touch is overcooked frozen broccoli.

But broccoli is not the subject here. Lima beans are. They were the exception that proved that I was not a perfect eater. I really did not like them. This was a problem because they were a not-infrequent vegetable offering during my childhood. My mother knew about nutrition, so we always had fruit to start (fresh grapefruit or canned fruit cup), and then a protein source, a starch, and a vegetable. It was before Atkins. Also before great produce was sold in supermarkets and fbefore rozen foods occupied a whole aisle. Often my mother made a salad: iceberg lettuce, cucumbers, and those awful tomatoes sold in plastic-wrapped groups of 3 that we said were like cardboard, because styrofoam, although it had been invented by then, was not yet a household word. Any non-salad vegetables came from cans: canned spinach -- which I actually liked: it had a sour lemony quality and a soft slimy texture that was not like anything else -- or canned green beans or canned zucchini in tomato sauce (which I can still eat with gusto straight from the can). When she could afford the splurge, my mother bought canned asparagus. And for variety, she'd pick up a can of lima beans.

What to do about the lima bean problem? I was a stubborn and hard-thinking child, with a preference for the elegant (in the mathematical sense). Not for me to dump the beans in my lap when nobody was looking. And I knew enough to know that confession and a plea for sympathy would have done no good at all. There was only one solution: I declared that I loved lima beans, and waited to see what happened.

What happened is that I do love lima beans. Especially the tiny ones in cans. But also the little dried ones that go into homemade beef barley soup. Lima beans are a pleasure. Thus I learned that sometimes a lie can turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Fast forward to the early days of my later-in-life teaching career. (At age 40 I became an adjunct law professor at Michigan, teaching patent law and sometimes copyright.) In the first years, I would occasionally have a student who was very attentive, very eager, but basically a pain in the neck: interrupting, showing off separately-acquired knowledge, catching me if I misspoke. The problem was, of course, that such students were also the smart ones, the ones who were going to go on in the field, the ones I'd be glad I'd had a chance to know before they conquered the world. I decided to treat them like lima beans. It worked. I began to love them. I appreciated that they were keeping me on my toes, that because of them I was not only thinking more clearly and intensely but also enjoying the experience more deeply and doing a better job overall. After a while, I internalized this process, and in later years I only noticed my students' lima characteristics in retrospect. But I still remember my early crop of human beans vividly. I am still in touch with them from time to time. They are the best.

Choosing to like, in advance of actually liking, is a good idea.

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

(The ideas for this essay were first committed to electrons in 2003; above is a minor revision from a September 2010 rewrite.)

The Head Smack Series

2010-05-22T10:27:00.000-07:00

I am an inveterate problem solver. I don't do it on purpose. Things just spring to my attention and, as soon as I notice them, I know a way to do them better. I name this characteristic “not being passive to information.” It may not be a sign of intelligence, but it’s how I am.

My problem with my problem-solving, if I may put it that way, is that my solving skills far exceed my convincing skills. This is frustrating. Cassandra has become my patron saint, when Methusaleh should be (ref: Gigi, “I’m Glad I’m Not Young Anymore,” lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner).

I find my ideas so obvious, so excellent, so simple-quick-inexpensive, that I figure that if I just tell the right person, ne will smack nis head and say, "You're so right. I'll make that happen immediately."

But my experience with Stanford, Google, San Mateo County, and other objects of my mental bounty is that my ideas are rarely implemented. I am tired of writing to folks up and down the org chart and not finding a head-smacker.

I have two theories. Both, I regret to say, are cynical or at least curmudgeonly.

But first I'll acknowledge that these head-smack solutions often solve problems that affect many, many people a little, little bit. That is, each affected person faces an occasional, temporary irritation, not a life threat. I've thought about how this skews all aspects of the matter: from identifying the problem to solving it to redressing the detriments of not having solved it sooner. Our litigation-centered view of societal problems is part of the story. These ideas may appear in upcoming posts called Cost-Benefit Calculus: The Area under the Curve and Litigation: It's NOT the Tip of the Iceberg. Stay tuned.

The financially cynical theory is that simple-quick-inexpensive solutions to real problems provide no room for corruption: no kickbacks, no bribes, no expensive presents from grateful contractors.

The psychologically cynical theory is that power-loving or ambitious people -- which describes pretty much all the people I write to in the hopes of finding a head-smacker -- view such solutions as ignorable.

You know the cynical old saying "Anything worth doing is worth doing for money”? Well, today’s version, applicable to both profit-making organizations and non-, may be “Anything worth doing is worth holding a power meeting about."

If there is no opportunity for scheduling a meeting with people whose schedules are already very full, and no reason to write a lengthy and serious report, and no possibility of favorable publicity, within the institution or outside it, then why bother? The fact that the solution serves the organization’s goals and will keep it from looking ridiculous to anyone who is affected (albeit temporarily and not severely) is not sufficient incentive to act.

Oh well. I accept defeat -- at least as to the efficacy of writing suggestions to those apparently in charge. Instead, I'll channel my energies into the Head Smack series.

NE-NER-NIS (part 2) - LANGUAGE 02

2010-05-21T12:13:00.000-07:00

As mentioned in a previous post, I've created a trio of neuter singular pronouns, as follows:

NE: subject pronoun. Replaces he, she, he or she, they, or one.
NER: object pronoun. Replaces him, her, him or her, them, or one.
NIS: possessive pronoun. Replaces his, her, hers, his or her, his or hers, their or theirs, or one's.

These pronouns can be used for persons (or animals or robots) of unknown, unspecified, or irrelevant gender.

WHY NER, and not NIM, for the OBJECT PRONOUN

Some people tell me they'd prefer NIM for the OBJECT pronoun. I explain that I thought about that, too, before I rejected it in favor of NER for OBJECT and NIS for POSSESSIVE.
Principle #1. Gender Equality. NE uses the E that is common to both HE and SHE. For the non-subject pronouns, I wanted to be fair and borrow the masculine ending for one and the feminine ending for the other.
Principle #2: Auditory Comfort. In order to be accepted, the substitute pronouns should be such that our mental and physical ears do not balk: the N is enough of a surprise.
The problem with using the ending sound of the feminine possessive is that it has two forms: HER and HERS:

It's HER book. The book is HERS.

HIS has only one form. The second person and the third person plural have two forms, too: THEIR and THEIRS, YOUR and YOURS, OUR and OURS. Our ears want to add that S - or rather the sound of Z - whenever the possessive has no noun after it. And then, of course, there's MY and MINE. HIS is unique in 2 ways, or maybe I mean singular in 3 ways. Anyway, because HIS is the same with or without a following noun, NIS seemed the better choice for the possessive. That made NER the right choice for the object pronoun.
In addition, ER is the ending of both the object and possessive feminine pronouns (plus that pesky HERS) That could lead to endless confusion or a violation of Principle #1 or both.

I feel certain that if people just start using these neuter pronouns, they can accustom their ears to the sounds.

NB: The Natural Superiority of NE NER NIS with apologies to Ashley Montagu*: The italicized sentence has two plural nouns: people and pronouns (the plural noun PRONOUNS, I mean). If I leave the humans singular, then I can use "THEM" as the pronoun for the pronouns. As it is, my use of "they" is ambiguous. To avoid further ambiguity, I chose to use "sounds" rather than "them" at the end of the sentence. With NE NER NIS at my disposal, I can write:

I feel certain that anyone who starts using these neuter pronouns can quickly accustom nis ears to them.

As to ear-training: At some level, good grammar and good word usage come down to things that do not offend the ears of the people who think they know better. And yes, I consider myself one of those people because I pay attention, I care, and I try to hold myself to a high standard of carefulness and thought. If you are reading this, you do, too. If you don't like NE NER NIS, then "people who think they know better," who I hope also qualify as reasonable people, can differ.

* Montagu (1905-1999), a male anthropologist, wrote The Natural Superiority of Women, one of my mother's favorite books. It was first published in 1953. A fifth edition came out in 1999.

LANGUAGE 01: The Reticent/Reluctant Hesitation

2010-04-05T12:13:00.000-07:00

In today's Chronicles of Higher Education, Gabriela Montela writes in the On Hiring column:

"In a recent post, Lesboprof chides herself for having been reticent about pursuing a leadership position in academe...."

Montela quotes a portion of the blog that does not contain the word RETICENT. I checked the actual post, however, and it does mention "reticence." Whoever's word it is, it is wrong.

Had the blogger been RETICENT, then she would have applied for the job but not told her friends about it. What she describes is being RELUCTANT to pursue (not RETICENT about pursuing) the position. Indeed her reluctance turned to refusal: she never did apply.

RELUCTANT may not be precisely the right word, but RETICENT is absolutely wrong.

RETICENT/RELUCTANT confusion, which I hadn't noticed at all until Mary F. White, friend and writer, pointed it out a couple of years ago, is exploding. I see it at least once a month. I have three theories to
explain this latest word abuse.

The first is the same as my theory about why begs the question is so often misused to mean raises the question and why disinterested is used when uninterested is meant. It goes like this: some very influential journalism professor made these mistakes. Ne* taught generations of students, some of whom went on to teach journalism themselves, and the gospel of misuse spread.

*NE is my preferred neuter subject pronoun. (See this post.) It liberates me from having to assign he or she to an unknown person, or having to recast my thoughts in plural. The object pronoun is NER. The possessive is NIS.

The second theory is that many writers use a dictionary or thesaurus to choose their words. Not being voracious readers themselves, they don't actually have a working vocabulary of more than a few hundred words. They run into trouble because dictionary definitions lack context or thesaurus' lists of synonyms do not explain nuances or limitations in application. (The edition of Wordly Wise, a popular text for middle school English classes, used by my daughter's class in 2005, was plagued by this problem. Its authors and editors seemed untroubled that all too often the sample sentences seemed to have been written by recent arrivals from Mars whose only resource was an abridged dictionary.)

My third theory is specific to this error. It is that RETICENT, because it rhymes with HESITANT (by sound although not by spelling), is what people think of when they want a word that starts with R that means hesitant. But Cockney slang aside, rhyming is no clue to meaning. RELUCTANT is the word they seek.

Here are my definitions for these two words, based on years of reading and listening to writers and speakers who respect the language. I have no idea whether any dictionary says this, but trust me: I'm right.

RETICENT means unforthcoming verbally, usually because of shyness or modesty. Reticence is a special form of close-mouthedness. Close-mouthed, however, has connotations of hiding the facts on purpose, being secretive. There's a negative criticism lirking in close-mouthed. Reticent is neutral, even sometimes laudatory. See example below.

A person who is RETICENT exhibits a particular kind of RELUCTANCE: a reluctance TO SPEAK. Example: Ne* was RETICENT about nis achievements; ne hated boasting.

RELUCTANT, on the other hand, means HESITANT. RELUCTANT often reflects a moral hesitation or other personal circumstance (reluctant because once bitten, because in poor physical shape, because of the cost), while HESITANT is more neutral, more all-purpose.

RELUCTANT is not specific to the action of speaking. If what you hesitate to do is a non-verbal activity -- applying for a job, running down the street, buying a house -- then you are RELUCTANT to take the action.

If the thing you hesitate to do is speak, you may be RETICENT about the subject matter.

Another clue: reticent is followed by ABOUT, and ABOUT is followed by the noun describing what you would have said if you hadn't been reticent. RETICENT ABOUT should never be followed by an action. If the word after ABOUT is a form of verb ending in ING, change RETICENT to RELUCTANT. (That's right even for communication. Instead of Reticent about talking about X just write reticent about X.)

The word after RETICENT should never be TO.

RELUCTANT is followed by an infinitive (TO + VERB). "Reluctant about" sounds funny to my mental ear. I'd probably redpencil "reluctant about Xing" to "reluctant to X," or I'd make it 'hesitant about Xing.' Hesitant works better with ABOUT. The right H word with TO, in my mental ear, is the verb HESITATE. Please don't hesitate to write if you have a comment or question.

ALSO: Please spread the word. Or rather, the WORDS.

RJM

April 5, 2010
rev 4/6/10

The Start of Several Series

2010-04-05T09:00:00.000-07:00

I plan to post a number of pieces that share a general subject. They will constitute series (serieses?) although I won't be writing regularly to any single series nor finishing one series before starting another. I will write when the spirit -- usually irritation plus procrastination -- moves me. Many will be based on things I have written over the years for myself or in email to friends or as (rejected) letters to the editor.

In myunpublishedworks, one series has already begun. It consists of thoughts from the Stanford Technology Law Review February 2010 Symposium on Patent Reform. Another was not billed as a series but could become one: Citizens United. (Next in that series: freedom to speak v. freedom to speak anonymously.) Other series in preparation are: myths in patent law, bluebooking, writing better judicial opinions, and why knowledge is always power even for potential accused infringers.

In myunpublishedworks2, one series has begun but without the series title, which will be "Very Short Essays." The first entry was http://myunpublishedworks2.blogspot.com/2009/09/merit-needs-publicist.html. Like "Merit Needs a Publicist," the posts in that series will be written in poetry form.

Other subjects I already know I will pursue are: language, transportation, economics, friendship, and human anatomy.

It seems unlikely I would write more than 9 times about any of these subjects, but just in case, I will use two digit numbers, starting with 01. Each essay in the series will be titled "SUBJECT-##: Specific Title."

Today I start with LANGUAGE-01: The Reticent/Reluctant Hesitation.

RJM
April 5, 2010

last rev 4/6/10.

The True Story behind the Hirschhorn Museum's Contest to Create Art from a Single Sheet of Paper

2010-03-22T12:32:00.000-07:00

In February 2008 a friend sent me a message with some wonderful images of paper-cutting sculptures. Today, more than two years later, I received the same message, with the same jpgs. Here's an example:

The message said:

> Entries for an sculpture art contest at the Hirshhorn

> Modern Art Gallery in DC.

> The artist could use only one sheet of paper.

Two years ago, as now, it seemed obvious that all these supposed contest entries were by the same person. That made me skeptical. I looked at the Hirshhorn's website. They had never had any such contest. I checked Snopes.com. Nothing. I forwarded the email to Snopes and meanwhile looked for more information. A blog that perpetuated the Hirshhorn contest myth included the images, so I forwarded the link (and my skepticism) to my usual recipients, rather than fill their inboxes with attachments.The blog page has disappeared or I'd give you the link here.

My friend Nancy 3. Hoffman was also curious, and she was more persistent and clever than I. She discovered that these are the works of a Danish artist, Peter CALLESEN. His wonderful website, http://petercallesen.com/index/index2.html, has many, many brilliantly creative and beautiful examples of his paper cutting art.

Snopes has never covered the story. I guess that the lack of proper attribution for an artist's work, and the incorrect reference to a nonexistent contest at a fine art museum, do not rise to the level of internet urban legend for them. Hence this post.

Maybe some day the Hirshhorn will hold an exhibit of Callesen's works. It hasn't yet, but maybe it should, so that this highly-circulated message will have -- retroactively -- a grain of truth.

The Oscars and Oscar the Grouch: Footnote

2010-03-09T08:21:00.000-08:00

When I wrote the title for my post yesterday, I had a suspicion that combining the Oscars and "Oscar the Grouch" was as original as combining motherhood and apple pie, but I went ahead anyway. Now I have a moment and can look, at least on the internet. For this year alone, there are at least two examples: Chris Laverty on February 2 in clothesonfilm.com and New York Daily News columnist Elizabeth Weitzman on February 26. And if I looked beyond the first page of hits, or even (gasp) explored pre-web sources (the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, perhaps, in the library), I'd probably find dozens and dozens of instances dating back to the time when Oscar the Grouch came into existence forty-odd years ago, at which point the Oscar the Award was already about thirty-five.

The Oscars Meet Oscar the Grouch - Part 2; Great news about Bigelow, but.

2010-03-08T15:46:00.000-08:00

Yes, it's wonderful that Kathryn Bigelow is the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Director. But. She worked with a male writer, an all male group of producers and a virtually all male cast. I haven't seen The Hurt Locker, I confess. Maybe the person listed seventh and last on the advertisement cast list, Evangeline Lilly, has a great part - even better than the first 6 put together - but I doubt it. The roles of the only other female names on the expanded cast list on IMDB are Mortuary Affairs Officer, Nabil's Wife and Soldier (uncredited). Those don't sound like opportunities for memorable performances, but I could be wrong.
Women are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Are they totally unimportant and marginalized? Does the army prohibit women from being in special forces units that deal with IEDs? Nope: or anyway, not according to this February 2010 report about Christine Ferguson Hein, a woman in an IED unit who received an award for bravery http://sullivanjournal.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=855&Itemid=38. Hein explains that the army has to include at least one woman in each unit because Muslim women can't be searched or talked to by men. If women do serve in IED units, what made Mark Boal leave them out? Maybe it was the same thinking that affected the National Geographic in a possibly apocryphal story I once heard: The magazine doctored a photograph of a group of kids who'd climbed to the top of a mountain in order to remove the girl. The reason: if they showed that a girl could do it, then boys wouldn't think it was a great achievement.
So, yes it's nice that a woman finally won an Oscar for directing. But the movie she directed is hardly a testament to the openness of the industry to female participation.

[last rev 9/12/11 - rjm]

Up: Against: Why I ultimately was down on UP

2010-03-07T10:26:00.000-08:00

Today, Pixar's UP is set to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. I find this a downer.

Don't get me wrong. I enjoyed the movie "UP." (What a dumb title in the Google age, though, eh?)   It was sweet and funny and it generally kept my attention. But about forty minutes into it, I realized something: It had NO major roles for female actors. True, in the beginning, the most interesting character is the little girl Ellie. But she gets killed off. After that, it's a Boy's Club through and through. Even the dogs are all boys. There's not a bitch among them. The bird, named Kevin, turns out to be female, but it's a non-speaking role in an animated film. Sorry, ladies: no opportunities there.

A note about Young Ellie: according to IMDB, she's played by someone named "Elie Docter." I guess they saved money by not having any open casting call for females at all on this film?

I identify as old, not just female, however, so I was happy and grateful that director Peter Docter and Pixar's writers gave a role to an older actor. Ed Asner is wonderful. But let's be real: statistically, the surviving spouse would have been the woman. Why ignore statistics when you could write the part for, say, Estelle Parsons? Maybe Asner needed the work, while Parsons had a gig on stage in August: Osage County, where she was brilliant, by the way. She certainly could have done a good job at crotchety and nay-saying. Or Diane Rheem. For once, her voice would have been exactly right.

But let's not stop with the creating and casting of Carl. There were other important roles. Was it necessary that the spunky and obnoxious kid be male? If the studio was worried about hints of inappropriate sexual interest, surely an old man could be as much under suspicion with a boy as with a girl. The scout could have been a girl scout. They get badges as well.

I won't quarrel with the Explorer being a man, although there were some real female precedents for female daring around the supposed time of Carl and Ellie's youth: Amelia Earhart, Beryl Markham. But if the explorer was a man, why did the surviving spouse, the child explorer, the helpful dog and the dog leader, to a man, have to be men? (And white, except for the kid, who, like Boo in Monsters, Inc., was drawn mildly Asian.)

Pixar does not, apparently, care about on-screen equal opportunity. And while Peter Docter and his writers and producers must have had mothers -- and maybe some had sisters and a few may have female spouses or offspring -- they seem to inhabit a world where women are utterly neglectable. And nobody at Disney, and not Steve Jobs, finds it odd. Odd.

I loved Monsters, Inc., too, but in thinking about it afterward, I was struck by the fact that all the main monsters and monsters' assistants were male. Women have a long history of scaring little children. They certainly do it in old Disney movies and the Wizard of Oz. Yet even Roz, the company receptionist with the ultimate power, was voiced by a male actor. True, the little girl is a little girl. And maybe that was the problem for UP. Pixar already had done a large older male with a little girl, so they didn't want to do it again. And a large older female with a little boy just never occurred to anyone.

I know there's a theory in Hollywood that boys and men have no interest in stories with female protagonists. Why that didn't bother our ancestors when they created fairy tales, I don't know. I guess box office was not a problem around the campfire. And I suppose that when Disney began to make blockbuster animated movies based on fairy tales, the truth of the anti-girls theory was not yet understood. Think about Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White [and the Seven Dwarfs, OK: all male] and Beauty and the Beast (at last, second billing for a male lead): each has a female title character played by a female actor, and plenty of supporting roles, including villains, voiced by women. Maybe only girls bought tickets for those movies? Or maybe Docter and his friends at Pixar have a long-standing, deep-seated grudge from a childhood of being forced to care about all those interesting girls and to be frightened by all those evil women, and now they want to get even?

I have a challenge for the studio and Mr. Docter. Write your next movie exactly the way you did Up and Monsters, Inc.: with almost no females in sight. But then require the storyboarders to draw all the characters, even the animals and robots, from real girls and women, and require the casting director to cast only female actors. I promise you, you can find women's voices in every range, from squeaky coloratura to bass. If you have to adapt the story a little, do it. If you're really as creative and funny and brilliant as you think you are, the result will be the best movie you have ever made. And female actors will at last find work at Pixar.

Thanks.

PS I first thought this and wrote about it to friends in the summer of 2009 right after seeing UP. But I procrastinated in posting it on this blog. I now see that other people wrote immediately. Here are some links. Please let me know if I should add more:
Linda Holmes, June 2009: http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2009/06/dear_pixar_from_all_the_girls.html
Packaging Girlhood, http://packaginggirlhood.typepad.com/packaging_girlhood/2009/06/hey-pixar-we-want-a-girl-lead-character.html

No Known End to the World - Science Fiction

2009-10-03T22:03:00.000-07:00

(I thought about this for several years before finally writing it down in early 2006. I submitted it to a story contest on 3/17/2006.--MUW2)

No Known End to the World

Explorers from a far distant planet arrived on Earth in what would have been the earth year of 3200, if there had still been people on earth to measure years, but there weren't.

The visitors found some ancient books and calendars and they were very puzzled. They could calculate when the last houses were occupied, the last pieces of clothing made, the last humans died. "Human civilization ended around 2400 in the earth dating scheme," they wrote in the Final Report on the Visit to Earth. But almost no physical objects with dates later than about 2010 could be found: no papers, no paintings, no books. There were plenty of machines the investigators could not turn on, and some things made of plastic that seemed to fit into the machines. A few machines seem to have numbers stamped on them, and some of those numbers might be dates after 2010, but none was later than about 2027.

A spokesperson for the explorers explained,
"Before 2010, the creatures that dominated the earth were enormously creative. We found paintings, sculpture, works on paper. Much was well preserved, although mostly in buildings that apparently had fallen into disuse by the second decade of the 2000s. We've also found some beautiful objects, human-sized and smaller, that we believe were used for making music: some wood, some metal, some with ivory, but our dating shows that these, too, are all from before 2010.

"Something happened to human civilization around that time, and because of it people stopped creating physical objects that would document their existence, their ideas, their souls. We hope for their sakes that they were able to express themselves some other way, maybe by using all those machines.

"We did find vast numbers of shiny circles in what look like huge trash heaps. But even those shiny circles were a short-lived phenomenon: manufacturing seems to have ceased by around 2015. There are also little plastic sticks with plastic covers over a metal end, often attached to ribbon, apparently to be worn around the neck. We don't, however, think those are jewelry. They may have been an alternative to the shiny disks. They, too, ceased to be manufactured well before the middle of the 21st century.

"How the civilization managed to survive another 400 years we may never know. They did keep building, but nothing built in those last centuries is beautiful: it is functional without joy, useful without delight.

"We have brought back to our planet specimens of many machines, and we hope to be able to make them work soon. Was it a factor in the death of this planet that its inhabitants lost the ability to create permanent records of their aspirations and achievements? Our committee agreed that we could only speculate about this. But in any case we grieve for the death of this planet. Had there been any descendants of the people who created the art and literature of the previous ten thousand years on earth, the universe would have been richer." //

Merit Needs a Publicist

2009-09-26T10:49:00.000-07:00

Merit Needs a Publicist

Merit needs a publicist.
It needs to be recognized
By the recognized.

You can heave off your bushel,
paint arrows on the sidewalk,
offer prizes, hand out samples,
but unless you get the attention
of those who command attention,
the bushel boomerangs,
obscuring your light
to extinction.

(It's the same - the opposite -
with evil, greed, cruelty.
Until someone of stature
points a finger and says
"For shame,"
people -
because people are sheep -
will ignore,
or worse, praise,
or worst, follow,
the perpetrators of hate.)

Merit needs a publicist:
Someone to say
"Well done"
in a voice people believe.
Merit won't out,
without it.

(I wrote the first version of this in March 2006. I'd thought it, the title, anyway, for a long time before that.)

The Need for a Neuter Pronoun: A Solution

2009-09-26T10:37:00.000-07:00

A couple of months ago, a New York Times Magazine's On Language column, that week written by Patricia T. O'Conner and Stewart Kellerman and entitled "All Purpose Pronoun", discussed the problem Twitter writers have because English lacks a neuter singular pronoun. People wondered whether "everyone" could be followed by the plural "they." Or was it necessary to use "he or she" and use up 9 of a Tweet's 140 character limit? I had an answer:

Dear Editor:
Concerning the he/she problem, I recommend that we use a group of new singular pronouns starting with the letter N. I choose N for neuter, and also because it's an underused initial letter in English. (I long ago noticed how few fiction writers have last names that start with N, and maybe that goes for the population as a whole?) NE, rhyming with she and he, will be the subject pronoun. We can go 50-50 on the sex-based endings for object and possessive pronouns, taking the ER from HER rather than the im from him, and the IS from HIS rather than the er/ers from her/hers: thus ne, ner, nis.

Let's try some examples.
Subject Pronoun: Ne. If anyone objects, ne should speak up now.
Object Pronoun: Ner. Go immediately to the person in charge and report the incident to ner.
Possessive Pronoun: Nis. Everybody must use nis own book.

It might take some getting used to, but if a few important people would use ne/ner/nis for neuter subject/object/possessive, soon everyone would. I can't make it happen myself but Barack Obama could. Or maybe Jay Lenno or Oprah. Which reminds me of one of my very short essays. Next: Merit Needs a Publicist.