Category Archives: language

AI Writing: Friend or Foe?

education, etc., funny things, language, literature, ,

You may have heard that AI writing means the death of writing done by actual, live people. In a way that’s true, and in a way it isn’t. Let me explain.

Many—perhaps most—of the fiction books that you see for sale on Amazon and other outlets are AI-written and almost universally bad. Rotten, really. So bad that you want to throw them against the wall. (Unless you have a Kindle, Nook, or other e-reader, of course. Then you only want to delete them. But I digress.) They are too short, too filled with adjectives and adverbs, too lacking in a coherent plot, and too deficient in character development. Even the most potentially vivid genres are bland.

You may say to yourself, “I could write a better novel than this turnip.” And you very likely could. (So why don’t you?)

But AI has taken over most of the writing space. Even books that you yourself don’t write aren’t written by a human being. (I should know. I often freelance for a ghostwriting service that shall remain nameless because of the NDA I signed. They used to have lots of us human beings doing the writing. Now they largely have “writing packages” produced by AI. The only time a human being touches the book is to supervise the AI engine, which sometimes goes madly astray, and to “humanize” the results (it’s known in the trade as “polishing dogshit into gold”). But I digress again. At length.)

That’s the bad side of AI writing. What, I hear you ask, is the good side?

It can make you a better writer.

Hear me out.

Let’s think about the most basic AI writing tool that almost everyone is familiar with: Grammarly. Yes, it follows along behind you and corrects what you’ve written when you’re typing too fast (like “isfamiliar”). And it always changes your word choice to “ducking.” It’s never “ducking.” But, if you pay attention to it, Grammarly is a teaching tool.

Grammarly sends you reports that list your most common mistakes that week (or month, I don’t remember). If it says you have problems with subject-verb agreement, brush up on that. If you have trouble remembering whether commas introduce an independent clause or a dependent one, look it up and try to remember it the next time you write.

Teachers worry that their students will use AI to write their papers for them. (One of my friends now has her students write out their essays longhand, like I did in the Victorian era. But I digress some more.) They may indeed rely on AI. (A survey of students found that they considered it cheating, however.) But there are many AI detectors available to teachers that sniff out suspiciously smelly AI-created sentences and paragraphs and report on how much of a piece of writing seems to be human or AI.

This, of course, has led to ways to avoid the AI detectors. One I saw recently offered a series of prompts a student could give the AI program in order to produce a piece of writing that would appear to be human-written. The list of things the sneaky student should tell the AI program to avoid was comprehensive and long.

It told students to create a prompt that specified not only the topic and tone of the illicit paper, but also to avoid common signs of AI content that the AI checkers teachers use frequently will flag.

The list of things to tell the AI to avoid included: sentences more than 20 words long without one clear idea and paragraphs all the same length; passive voice; abstractions instead of concrete words; sentences of all one length; a lack of measurable facts; suspect punctuation (semi-colons and em dashes) (I disagree with this stricture. I love semi-colons and em dashes, as if you hadn’t noticed. But I digress yet again.); overused words and phrases (an extensive list, including last but not least, cutting-edge, delve, game changer, nonetheless, despite, moist, subsequently, furthermore, utilize, leverage (and any other biz-speak or tech jargon)); adverbs and adjectives; hedging; more than one prepositional phrase or verb phrase; all-caps or numbered lists; and metaphors involving landscapes, music, or journeys. (I once asked ChatGPT to write some poetry, and it really overdid those metaphors. But I digress even more.)

In other words, if you know what to tell the AI not to do, you already know for yourself what not to do—or keep that list handy and refer to it often—you’ll be able to write your own sparkling prose without Robby the Robot’s assistance. And the process of learning to tell the AI how to write undetectably will improve your own writing.

If you think of AI as a way to learn instead of a way to cheat, you’ll do well.

Thoughts on Editing

etc., funny things, humor, language, writing, ,

When it comes to language, I used to be a prescriptivist, telling others how language ought to be used. Now I am a descriptivist, recording how language is used in practice.

Oh, I haven’t entirely given up my mission to get people to use proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation. I still feel that writing “correctly” can be important to the meaning of whatever it is you’re writing about. And I still cringe when someone (usually my husband) says “foilage” instead of “foliage” or “nucular” instead of “nuclear.” But that’s speech, which is very different than writing.

Of course, an editor can’t really edit spoken English aside from pronunciation. Well, there are malapropisms and misplaced modifiers.

Malapropisms occur when a speaker substitutes an incorrect word for a correct one. One headline that makes the rounds on Facebook is about an “amphibious” pitcher, when “ambidextrous” is meant.

Misplaced modifiers are descriptive phrases in the wrong place in a sentence. The classic misplaced modifier is Groucho Marx’s “Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. What it was doing in my pajamas I’ll never know.” (A misplaced modifier is often confused with a dangling modifier, which happens when an introductory phrase modifies the wrong subject in a sentence: “Painting for three hours, the portrait was finally finished.” Who is painting for three hours? We don’t know, but it certainly wasn’t the portrait. I once worked with a man who described any kind of grammatical mistake, even a subject-verb agreement error, as a dangling modifier. But I digress.)

One of the places I often encounter “faulty” grammar, spelling, and punctuation is on social media. I have to think twice before I share memes with errors in them because I’m afraid someone will think that I don’t know the difference. (I know Lizzie Borden’s name isn’t spelled “Bordon,” but I couldn’t resist the joke: “If you get any messages from my parents, don’t answer them. They’ve been hacked.” But I digress again.)

Speaking of memes, I once saw one that said one shouldn’t look down on someone who mispronounces less-familiar words. It means they learned them from seeing them in print rather than hearing them. One of my dear friends treated the word “sarcophagus” that way and came to me to learn the proper pronunciation. I was happy to oblige. (I’ve also heard of the phenomenon going the other way. Another guy I knew had only ever heard the name Sigmund Freud spoken. He wrote it down as “Froid,” a fair guess based on the sound, but outrageously inaccurate nonetheless. But I digress yet again.)

When it comes to language I do like, however, I love new additions to English. “Portmanteau” words are particularly fun. They’re made up of two words or parts of words smashed together to mean something new. One that everyone knows (but don’t realize is a portmanteau) is “smog,” which comes from “smoke” and “fog.” (I say I like them, but not the ugly portmanteau words that crop up, especially during the holidays. Nothing is simply a sale. It’s always an “aganza,” “palooza,” “bration,” or “thon.” The first million times someone did that, it may have been clever, but the shine has long worn off. But I digress some more.)

Anyway, back to editing. I hereby apologize to everyone whose infinitives I unsplit and whose prepositions I moved away from the end of sentences. I’m really sorry. My bad. Think of me as a recovering prescriptivist. Maybe not fully recovered yet, but I try.

DPF&P

funny things, family, etc., language, ,

“DBF&P” is one of the mantras that Dan and I have, and we have to use it often. As you may have guessed from the visual, it’s a football term. (Not that either one of us is a football fan. Dan isn’t any kind of sports fan (he asks me regularly if I mind that he isn’t) and I only ever watch Olympic gymnastics. But I digress.)

So, what does DBF&P mean? It’s a saying we use when everything seems to be going wrong. What are we going to do? Drop back five and punt.

It’s useful in so many situations. Don’t have enough money to pay a certain bill? Drop back five and punt. Don’t have any side dishes to go with the pork loin? Drop back five and punt. Don’t know what to tell Dan’s mom about our politics? Drop back five and punt. Can’t get transportation to a doctor’s appointment? Drop back five and punt. (In those situations, DBF&P might mean moving money around; finding the can of sliced new potatoes we bought once upon a time; discussing the weather and the cats; or calling Lyft. But I digress some more.)

Now, as to how we came up with this useful locution, I’d have to say its origins are shrouded in the mists of time. I don’t remember a time when we didn’t use it. And now I pass it along to you. Feel free to use it whenever you don’t know what to do.

What other sports phrases might you use when you don’t know what to do? Pick up the spare? Fake left and juke right? Bite their ear off? Play out the clock? Bob and weave? Take a shot? Tuck? Duck? Bunt? (That one’s actually pretty good.)

But we don’t stop there. Dan and I have other mantras, too. One of my favorites is “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” (Dan’s usual response to that is, “I knew you were going to say that.”) There’s also, “The cat did it,” “Ow, Toby!” and “I can’t get up. There’s a cat on me.”

We have separate mantras when one or the other of us loses something like our keys or wallet, sayings inherited from our fathers. Mine used to say, “I’m going to tie it on a string and hang it around your neck.” Dan’s father, who was sometimes more colorful, would say, “If it was up your ass, you’d know where it was.” Undeniable words to live by.

I suppose these aren’t really mantras since we don’t sit and meditate on them. Probably not affirmations, either, which have to be more inspiring. Generally, they’re preludes to action (except the one about the cat on the lap). Maybe they’re mottos. Catchphrases, perhaps?

One catchphrase we have is borrowed from a TV series. We always use it when we start singing a lyric and forget the next line. (We do this a lot. Both of us tend to sing somewhat-appropriate songs as part of conversation. If he says that we’re going to clean up the entire kitchen, I’ll burst into “To Dream the Impossible Dream.” If I say I’m going to get around to cleaning the kitchen, he’ll start singing “I Get Around.” But I digress again.) Anyway, when we draw a blank on the next line, we use Homer Simpson’s classic “D’oh!” (Homer himself once used it this way, when he was singing a song about what to do in case of fire. He ended it, “There is something you should learn. Something, something. D’oh!” But I digress yet again.)

I suppose we ought to pay The Simpsons royalties every time we say “D’oh!” I don’t know who to pay for DBF&P.

The Tyranny of SEO

books, etc., humor, language, writing, , ,

There’s a phenomenon called “search engine optimization,” or SEO for short. And I’ve grown to hate it.

The idea of SEO is to increase the chances of your post, article, book, or whatever being at the top of the responses to a Google search. Writers and publishers in particular are invested in making sure that their wares gain the attention of Google and then potential readers.

SEO works by focusing on keywords. There are certain words and phrases that people search for more than others. If your work contains these words, it will appear further up the Google results and, presumably, increase sales. It’s all about “search visibility” and marketing strategies. There are plenty of books and websites that teach you how to improve your SEO game.

What are some of the best, top keywords that people search for? Well, best and top show up high on the lists. Everyone wants to know the best places to eat or the top-rated appliances, so those words show up a lot. “How to” is another search term that gets top results.

There are lists of keywords for any number of fields. If you have a book or article on health and fitness, your SEO keywords include “weight loss,” “lifetime fitness,” and “health tips.” Business keywords include “money” (of course), “opportunity,” “income,” and “profitability.” There are lists of keywords for coffee, dog training, and poker, among many, many others. For one of my areas of interest, mental health, keywords include “symptoms,” “medication,” and “side effects.” There are companies that specialize in giving you a list of keywords for your project—for a price.

What really ticks me off is what this has done to book subtitles. (Yes, I know that there are much more important things to be ticked off about, especially these days. However, I work in the publishing field, so I get to see a lot of subtitles. But I digress.)

Let’s start with one that isn’t all that annoying: How to Sustain Personal and Organizational Excellence Every Day. Eight words only. But look at the SEO keywords. We have Personal and Organizational Excellence. Sustain may be a keyword too, and so might Every Day. What could the author have done instead? Organizational Excellence ought to do it. Combined with a title like Habits for Success, that ought to do it. Still plenty of SEO words. Or just have a title: Success and Organizational Excellence. No subtitle. But that goes against every publishing rule, evidently.

Here’s another subtitle that’s been reined in just a bit: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith. Nine words. It says what you’ll find in the book without going on and on. Just enough to pique the potential readers’ interest. (While we’re on the subject of things that tick me off (and I think we were), I cringe whenever I see “peak” someone’s interest, or, God help me, “peek.” But I digress again.)

Now here’s a subtitle that goes a little further overboard: Dynamic Techniques for Turning Fear, Indecision, and Anger into Power, Action, and Love. Thirteen words. Dynamic Techniques, Power, Action, and Love are obvious self-help SEOs. I can imagine the title that would go with it: Transform Your Life.

Let’s keep going. Next on my list of terrible subtitles is Stop People Pleasing, Staying Silent, & Feeling Guilty… And Start Speaking Up, Saying No, Asking Boldly, And Unapologetically Being Yourself. Twenty words, one of them a mouthful by itself: unapologetically. Honestly, I think you could read the first chapter in the time it takes to read the subtitle.

Finally, here’s a subtitle that really grates: Transform Your Body in 28 Days with Illustrated Exercises. Lose Belly Fat, Sculpt Glutes, and Feel More Energized in Just 10 Minutes a Day! Twenty-four words, four verbs, and a plethora of nouns and adjectives. And a promise with an exclamation point. What is there left to say in the book? Whoever wrote that subtitle ought to have their thyroid checked.

On the other hand, maybe I’m just jealous. I wrote two books before SEO took off. (I still get royalties. I’m saving up for a pizza. But I digress some more.) Maybe I should have called them Bipolar Me: The True Story of One Woman’s Journey Through Mental Illness, Depression, and Hypomania, Based on Her Weekly Journal of the Same Name and Bipolar Us: A Deep Dive into Bipolar Disorder and Its Devastating Effects on Sufferers and Society, the Highs and Lows That Come With It, and How to Find Peace and Stability.

Of course, if I did that, the subtitles would have had to be printed in little tiny type, another aspect of publishing that really ticks me off. With my bad eyesight, I wouldn’t even be able to read my own subtitles. I can’t win.

The Cat Burglars

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I used to live in a drafty log cabin on a windy hill. There were plenty of odd noises, especially at night. Now I live in a regular home in a windy valley, with lots of clutter. There are still plenty of odd noises, especially at night.

It’s been my policy to blame the cats (usually from three to five of them) for any noises – rattling, thumping, skittering, whining, tapping, crashing, howling, et endless cetera. Even if every cat in the house is occupying my lap at the time, I still try to find a way to blame alarming noises on them.

One night, however, my husband and I were peacefully sleeping when I thought I heard a noise in the living room.

It sounded like whispering.

Whatever else they do, cats don’t whisper. For once I couldn’t blame them. It had to be burglars, I thought, discussing what they wanted to take or which house to hit next or why we had such crappy stuff and was any of it worth anything.

I didn’t want to wake my husband, because then I’d have my N.O.W. card taken away, so I tried to remember where we put the baseball bat and extended my hearing as far as it would go. I crept closer to the bedroom door, where I could hear the sounds better.

Then I realized that the noise was indeed people whispering. In French.

Even in my fearful, dazed state, I couldn’t believe that there were actually burglars in my house, in Ohio, speaking French.

So I tiptoed into the living room. If for some unlikely reason, there were French-speaking burglars, I could astound them with my knowledge of French, threaten to call the gendarmes, or at least ask them for directions to the bibliothèque. (That’s most of what I remember of my high school and college French. I also remember some of my college Russian, in which I can say useful things like “Excuse me, please. Where do they sell books on history?” and “Yes, cabbage is a good thing.” (At least I would never be bored or starve.) But I digress.)

When I tentatively poked my head into the living room, however, I found the French speakers were on the television. A foreign film was playing. Funny. I hadn’t left the TV on when I went to bed.

Hm. My husband doesn’t watch foreign films or know any French or other foreign languages. (Actually, that’s not quite true. He knows a song in high school German that goes “My hat has three corners. Three corners has my hat. If it doesn’t have three corners, it’s not my hat.” But I digress some more.) Besides, he was asleep in bed.

Then I realized what had happened. Someone had activated the remote and selected a film channel. With the sound very low. Although I couldn’t name the culprit, it was clearly Matches or Maggie or Chelsea or Shaker, all of whom were giving me the “Who, me?” look. One of them had done it, or they had all cooked up the plot together. There was no use dusting for paw-prints. No doubt they had wiped them off with their floofy tails.

So the one time I knew it couldn’t be the cats, it was. Now I blame them for everything. Always.

Who Owns the Rainbow?

Christianity, etc., language, social policy, , , , ,

I can’t believe that a rainbow is controversial, but there you have it. These days it is. The problem is that the rainbow means many different things to many different people.

This being Pride Month, we see a lot of pride flags, shirts, coffee cups, buttons, posts, memes, etc. with rainbows on them. They are brightly colored rainbows, not the more pastel kind you see in the sky after a rain. They’re meant to symbolize sexual diversity and visibility. The rainbow flag was first flown in 1978 at the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day parade. Now the rainbow flag stands for gay pride. You also see flags with white, pink, and blue, and black and brown added in some configuration for trans visibility and POC intersectionality.

There’s pushback, though. There’s the question of whether—and how much—rainbow merchandise should be displayed in mass-market retail stores during Pride Month. The manufacturers and sellers, whether they actually support the LGBTQIA+ community or not, naturally want to make money, and their first instinct is that people supportive of gay pride will buy rainbow-themed products. The pushback comes from some in the heterosexual community who feel that too much square footage and prominence have been given over to gay pride merchandise. Fearing that they would lose money if the complaining heterosexuals shopped elsewhere, some retailers cut down on the stock of rainbow merchandise or put it in the back of stores so it would be, if not back in the closet, at least less in-your-face.

Some Christians also push back against the rainbow-as-gay-pride concept by invoking religion. The rainbow, they say, belongs to God and is not to be associated with what they see as sin. It was a sign of God’s promise never to destroy the world with a flood again and so symbolizes holiness, faithfulness, and salvation. I’ve seen Facebook posts and memes promoting this understanding of rainbows and an attempt to “take back” the rainbow for God.

Call me pedantic, but no one seems to talk about what a rainbow actually is. It’s a product of refraction, which Sir Isaac Newton explained in 1665 when sunlight hit a prism and produced a color spectrum that resembled a rainbow. National Geographic defines a rainbow this way: “a multicolored arc made by light striking water droplets.” The controversy over rainbows, however, is not about what they are but what they symbolize.

Symbols, to get pedantic again, are not absolutes. They mean what we put into them, what we believe about them. And they change meanings over time. The Don’t Tread on Me flag (technically called the Gadsden Flag) was once a symbol of Colonial America’s resistance to the British. More recently, it became associated with the Tea Party movement and other right-wing causes. What does it symbolize now? Independence (though not from the British)? No taxation? Anti-government sentiment in general? Objections to one particular political party? All of the above? None of the above? When there’s that little agreement, the symbolic meaning fades out and the flag simply means “I’m angry” or perhaps “I’m defiant.”

The same is true of the American flag as a symbol. To some people, it represents the United States itself. To others, it means American ideals like liberty and justice for all. To still others, it stands for the US military. So if you disrespect the flag (in whatever way) who or what you’re disrespecting—the nation, the ideals, or the military—depends on how you interpret the symbol. (There’s no pushback at all against flag-themed clothing. At one time that was thought to be disrespectful too. It’s part of the US Flag Code that the flag shouldn’t be worn as clothing, but hardly anyone knows that anymore, much less abides by it.)

So, back to the rainbow. Going on the principle that a symbol means what you put into it, there’s no use fighting over what it means. It means different things to different people in different circumstances. Everyone is entitled to associate it with any meaning they prefer, whether that be gays or God. Or, as I prefer, refracted light in the sky that looks pretty. That’s a lot less contentious.

Now I wait for the comments that I’m disrespecting gays, God, or America (though probably not Sir Isaac Newton). You’re entitled to your symbolism. But no one owns the rainbow.

The Rise of the Asterisk

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It’s well-known (by people who know me) that I love punctuation. I read books about punctuation. I have two punctuation tattoos. My favorite mark of punctuation is the semicolon (which is one of the tattoos I have). But lately, when it comes to punctuation, the asterisk is in the ascendancy. And that’s because an increasing number of books have swear words in their titles. Punctuation is how we address the problem delicately.

The first example of the trend and at the time most shocking was Go the F**k to Sleep, a book that purported to be a read-to-kids goodnight book, but was really an expression of parental frustration. It caused quite a buzz.

After that came The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck (and the more daintily titled The Subtle Art of Not Caring About People’s Opinion), I Used to Be a Miserable F*ck, Unfu*k Yourself, The French Art of Not Giving a Sh*t, and F*ck Feelings. For those who prefer hashtags, there’s Unf#ck Your Brain. The winner for the longest title is The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck: How to Stop Spending Time You Don’t Have with People You Don’t Like Doing Things You Don’t Want to Do (A No F*cks Given Guide). And Everything is #@%!ed! uses a whole string of punctuation. Fucking This shit Show: A Gratitude Journal for Tired Women dispenses with the veil of punctuation altogether. (I can’t help that inconsistent capitalization. That’s the way it’s written. Maybe shit is supposed to look less threatening in lowercase? But I digress.)

(When marks of punctuation are used as stand-ins for letters or words, they’re called “grawlix,” an almost completely useless word, but one I’m quite fond of. Most people have seen grawlix only in comic books when Popeye, for example, wants to cuss. But I continue digressing.)

What’s the reason for all the daintily disguised sweary titles? It’s not like we don’t know what the asterisks stand for. It’s not fooling anyone. Go the F**k to Sleep was obviously meant to be shocking, though it also expressed humor and frustration. After that, it looks like a bandwagon was jumped on. The book even jumped on its own bandwagon. Now it’s a trilogy, including You Have to F**king Eat and F**k, Now There Are Two of You.

(I note that most of the sweary titles go with self-help books. Does this indicate a certain irreverence regarding the concept of self-help? Frustration with the concepts in the books? I know I’ve wanted to swear at self-help books during various periods of my life. Now I write them, though (so far) none have titles that require grawlix. But I digress some more.)

Personally, I have no objection to swearing. For a long time, I couldn’t do it, but after working as a waitress, I made up for lost time. Now I swear like a sailor, though with better enunciation. Sometimes, a curse word is just the right one. And of course, when I use a swear word in writing, I punctuate it properly. No grawlix here.

My favorite unexpected use of punctuation, however, comes in this brief verse:

Mary’s little lamb / Upon the grass did frisk. / But Mary was afraid / Her little * .

Now that’s creative punctuation!

Chatty Catty

cats, etc., family, humor, language, pets, ,

Yes, I’m one of those crazy ladies who talks to my cats. The thing is, some of them talk back. They’re not often communications that I can understand, but I don’t care. It’s like having the TV on in the background while I write. It’s part of the ambient sound of the house.

(Once one of my cats did communicate something recognizable to me via brain waves. Dushenka was sitting on the arm of the sofa looking at me, and I swear I could hear her thought: “I need a drink of water.” When I checked it out, her water dish, which she couldn’t see from the sofa, was indeed empty. It was a psychic communication, adorable and yet a little creepy. But I digress.)

We had a cat named Shaker who taught a parakeet to speak cat. Shaker went around all day saying r-row (rhymes with now). We’d have little conversations with her. (“Shaker, what’s a kitty say?” “R-row.” “Yes, that’s right.”) Well, Ralphie the parakeet (named after Ralph Waldo Emerson), after hearing all this r-rowing many times a day, began saying it too. (We tried to teach him to say “Pretty bird,” but he only ever picked up the “bird” part. He started saying “Shaker-bird.” He was one confused little guy. But I digress again.)

Some of our cats stuck to the stereotypical “meow,” but they put their own spin on it. Julia, for example, had a little meow that was decidedly bitchy. Her personality wasn’t a bit bitchy, but her meow sure was. Her littermate Laurel had a silent meow, perhaps in self-defense. She would simply open her mouth with her lips forming the word “meow,” but no sound came out. (Do cats have lips, anyway? I’m not sure. Siri claims they do.) Louise would make a darling little sigh when I held her in my arms. I melted every time she did that.

I loved silent Laurel, of course, but I longed for another talkative cat. I went to the shelter and told the helper, “I want a talker.” All the aides looked at each other and then simultaneously pointed at one particular cage. (The kitty in the cage was named Precious Bob. That would never do. We renamed him Jasper. But I digress some more.) Jasper would wait until we were in bed at night, then come bounding up on the bed and meow both incessantly and insistently. We didn’t know what he was saying—just that it seemed terribly important to him. We would ask him what it was all about. “What’s that you say, Jasper? Timmy fell down the well? And Grandpa fell in after him? And all the rescuers sent to get them out fell in too? And then a plane crashed into the well? And caught fire?”

Our present cat, Toby, doesn’t bug us for food (mostly, that is), but when we say the magic words, “Toby, do you want to EAT?” he says mm-weep. He makes other cute noises like mm-wow and mm-woo, but mm-weep is saved for breakfast and dinner. He occasionally snores. (We briefly considered whether he needed a little kitty CPAP, but then we considered trying to put one on him and rapidly changed our minds. But I digress some more.)

But that’s just how our cats communicate with us. There’s also the ways we communicate with them. These vary from babytalk that makes us sound like babbling idiots: “Toto-boo-boo, does you want your noms? Num, num, num—om-nom” to pleading: “Toby, get off my lap. I need to pee” or “Move! You’re standing on my boob. You weigh like a brick!” It doesn’t matter. He ignores both babble and pleading. Just like a cat.

-Punk, -Core, and Portmanteaus

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So you thought punk was something that had its vogue years ago and has disappeared since. Or maybe you just hope it has.

It’s true that you don’t hear much about punk music anymore, but punk is alive and well in the fictional world. As long as it’s combined with something else, that is. There is, as far as I know, no strictly punk genre of stories and books. But there are cyberpunk, steampunk, and even stonepunk and solarpunk.

(All of these are “portmanteau words,” squished-together words or sounds that combine two meanings to create a new one. Think smog, webinar, bromance, brunch, or spork (which I still call a runcible spoon). Or, given the time of year, spooktacular. But I digress.)

These varieties of fiction share the sensibilities of punk such as rebellion, individualism, social inequality, and unconventional thinking. (Less screaming, feedback, and safety pin piercings, though. Thank goodness.)

Most people’s introduction to the hyphenpunk world was a 1984 (appropriately) science fiction novel, Neuromancer, by William Gibson. It presented a dark, gritty, dystopian society in which a killer AI invaded people’s brains. At the time it served as a warning, which apparently we have not heeded. (Since then, almost all -punk fiction has been sci-fi or fantasy. At least I haven’t seen any romancepunk or mysterypunk. Again, thank goodness. But I digress again.)

Cyberpunk didn’t start any fashion trends the way punk music did (using the word “fashion” loosely). But another iteration of -punk has: steampunk. Steampunk combines Victorian-era technology and problems with a sense of adventure and invention and owes a lot to the writing of Jules Verne. You’ll find air battles between pirates in blimps, steam-powered robots pieced together from spare parts, and plots involving gaslighting (the streetlamp kind, not the manipulative kind). It’s a celebration of innovation, progress, and developing technology combined with nostalgia for a time when science was exciting, not threatening, and possibilities for advancement seemed limitless. Steampunk, unlike cyberpunk, is uplifting.

Nowadays, you can see steampunk aficionados at clubs and sci-fi conventions dressing in Victorian garb, embellished with brass gears, gauges, and wheels. One trendy accessory is the top hat with welding goggles as a hatband. Women can dress as aviators (aviatrixes? aviatrices?) with, obviously, aviator goggles. One would assume that the expected reaction from those not in the know is goggling at them. (Sorry, not sorry.)

(And that stonepunk and solarpunk I mentioned? Those refer to fiction that immerses the reader in a Flintstones-like past and a back-to-the-land agrarian setting respectively, with technology based on those eras. But I digress still more.)

Now on to -core, another element used in portmanteau words related to the music scene, rather than fiction. As you might guess, the word “hardcore” is the origin of the term. But instead of referring to pornography, -core applies to an extreme expression of any kind of music. Skacore. Thrashcore. Even emocore, unlikely as that sounds. (Theoretically, you could have punkcore music, but I’ve never heard that term used. Nor punkpunk fiction, for that matter. There is a subset of country music called cowpunk, so I guess you could have cowpunkcore. But I digress even more.)

Historical note: Lewis Carroll, author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass pioneered the creation of portmanteau words. (A portmanteau is “a case or bag to carry clothing in while traveling, especially a leather trunk or suitcase that opens into two halves.” So portmanteau, when it comes to words, is actually a metaphor.) Carroll’s epic poem “Jabberwocky” contained several. Slithy (as in “the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe”) is, he said, a combination of lithe and slimy; frumious, a mashing-together of furious and fuming; and chortle, a portmanteau of chuckle and snort that is still used today.

(Less historical note: Thanks to the book The Annotated Alice (annotations by Martin Gardner), which I highly recommend, I learned how to recite the first verse of “Jabberwocky” in French, a skill with no practical applications whatsoever. But I digress. My last digression for this post. I promise.)

(Just kidding. Bonus digression. Back to -punk and -core. There exists a series of books that combines steampunk, thriller, and fantasy. (A Study in Silks (The Baskerville Affair)). Steampunk-Holmes-demoncore, I guess you’d call it.)

Political Noise

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USA Flag Man YellingThis was written seven years ago. Unfortunately, it’s just as relevant today.

A friend of mine started a Facebook page called Political Noise. I wish he hadn’t.

Oh, I don’t mind that he (mostly) keeps his political rants on a separate page from his puns, movie reviews, and discussions of pop culture. What I mind is the title. There’s already too much noise in politics.

So much noise that the signal can’t get through.

Wikipedia defines signal-to-noise ratio (or SNR) as “a measure … that compares the level of a desired signal to the level of background noise.” Think of an old-fashioned television set or radio.  When there’s too much static, you can’t get a clear picture or clear sound. At most, you get a snowstorm of non-information or a meaningless buzz.

That’s what’s happening in interpersonal communication these days. It’s worse because of upcoming elections, of course. It seems that whoever shouts the loudest gets the most attention. The content – the message – has become irrelevant.

In fact, the content has dwindled to nothing. Words that no longer retain any meaning are flung at the heads of those who are supposed to be recipients of the message. Patriot, citizen, terrorist, liberal, fascist, tyrant, and other, cruder, forms of common words no longer have denotations (agreed-upon definitions), but only connotations (emotional content). Linguist S. I. Hayakawa nailed it back in 1941:

[W]e discover that these utterances really say “What I hate (‘liberals,’ ‘Wall Street’), I hate very, very much,” and “What I like (‘our way of life’), I like very, very much.” We may call such utterances snarl-words and purr-words.

Then there’s the problem of who’s supposed to be receiving the message, the snarls and purrs. Sadly, the answer seems to be, only those who already agree with you. Try as they might, nay-sayers’ voices will not be heard – certainly not understood. Multiple viewpoints are not welcome.

We are all shouting across an abyss and can neither hear nor be heard. The only response is an echo.

If ideas are not in play, surely facts must be. Alas, not. Facts are fungible and loaded with political opinions. Want a fact about climate change or voter suppression or welfare, or, god help us, guns? People on both sides can rustle up some statistics from somewhere. There is always a scientist who’s an outlier, or is funded by someone with an agenda. Cherry-picking and rhetorical fallacies (strawman, slippery slope, post hoc ergo propter hoc, appeal to the common man or to authority, etc.) have become Olympic-level sports.

Not only is this cacophony damaging, it is counterproductive. No one convinces anyone of anything by shouting at them. The goal isn’t really persuading anyone else – you can’t do that by telling people they’re evil and stupid. The only goal is reinforcing oneself and one’s own worldview – intellectual masturbation.

I do not think that the situation will change for the better once the elections are over. I can’t believe that people will stop, take a step back, and lower their voices or the heat of their rhetoric. The only solution offered for noise is louder noise.

Some of us wish for clearer signals, less interference, a volume knob that begins at less than 11. Less shouting and more hearing. Listening. Thinking. Considering. Compromising. Maybe the secret is asking questions instead of yelling slogans. What do you suggest? Why do you think that will work? Whom will that help? How can we best use our time, our resources, our selves?

I’m not a little old-fashioned lady asking for a little old-fashioned civility here. Empty politeness is not the solution. Real work is – the extremely hard work of true communication. Sharing ideas, not screaming them. Trying solutions, instead of dismissing them. The mental work of trying to understand; the physical work of acting locally; the emotional work of finding common ground; the spiritual work of valuing one another. These are ways to get signals through the noise.

If what we really want to do is communicate, not pat ourselves on the back and vilify others, that is. But all I hear are snarls and purrs.