Letters to Sg

I really need to delete this post before you’re old enough to read this site. I don’t want you believing that I’m an immature loser, even if it’s true.

There’s this app you enjoy on the iPad called Bartleby’s Book of Buttons. And there’s this scene where Bartleby and Captain Kinkaid are aboard the H.M.S. Pickle, which is a submarine. And they meet this giant squid. And Captain Kinkaid says…. well, how about you just have a look:

Oh man, I’d like to not giggle when I hear this. But I can’t. It cracks me up every time. So I do a lot of chuckle stifling.

Anyway, I had a little spare time this weekend. And having the Jim the Squid comment on video, I felt compelled to take it to the next level. So here, for your viewing pleasure, is the Jim the Squid Remix:

It’s getting harder to see the stuff I want to see in my Facebook News Feed without the aid of third party browser add-ons. And maybe I’m getting old – well, I guess it’s a fact that I’m getting old. But I’m having a hard time understanding how Facebook’s “Frictionless Sharing” is supposed to be a good idea. What’s more, I haven’t taken the time to really understand all of the ways that Facebook tracks my behavior on other sites, but people whose instincts I trust have been expressing alarm about recent Facebook privacy developments. It seems like Facebook is getting more and more aggressive about capturing and commoditizing my data while offering less and less to me in return.

Since I am probably on my way out the door at Facebook, I’m going to stop expending the (admittedly tiny) effort to double post at Facebook and at Google Plus, and will from now on just post at Google Plus. I will still read and comment at Facebook. But if Google keeps up the pace of development of Plus, and if Facebook continues to be creepy, I imagine I will eventually opt out of Facebook altogether (if opting out is still allowed when the time comes).

Why would I be more comfortable with Google, who is also extremely eager to capture and commoditize my data? There’s the fact that Google already owns my balls. I am only partly kidding. There is something to be said for minimizing the number of media companies with total visibility into my electronic life. Google is already in my email and on my phone, so advantage Goog.

More relevant to this post, Google Plus seems to work more like Facebook used to: it allows me to decide what to share and when. Google knows every song I listen to through Google Music, just as Facebook now apparently knows everything I listen to through Spotify. Facebook’s default assumption going forward seems to be that all of that data should be shared, whereas Google assumes I don’t want to share that data unless I decide otherwise. In general, I am finding that my news feed at Google Plus is higher quality than my Facebook news feed, and I assume that is related to the fact that every Google Plus post I see is the result of another user’s conscious decision to share the post with me (or to share it with a group I have opted in to).

Anyway, to those of you who decide to investigate Google Plus, look me up when you get there.

When we last encountered your bed on this website, the girl-bed relationship was off to a rocky start. It’s not a topic we have revisited, but things have generally been fine.

Your bed is designed to be flipped-turned upside down (much like the life of a certain nobleman) so that the low bed with a canopy frame becomes a loft. AT and I have been wanting to flip it for a while, but we have been holding out for a certain comfort with your decision-making skills. We decided to go ahead anyway.

So we flipped the bed two nights ago. Yesterday, we went to Ikea and bought a bunch of other stuff to go in your room to give you more places to put away all of your junk. Some photos of your room refresh follow. Not pictured is your new desk, which we haven’t really figured out where to put. Maybe under your window? Also, we left the legs for the desk at Ikea.

I just learned: In American English, it may be appropriate to use “different than” (instead of “different from”) if the words following it constitute a clause. Especially if (and this is the cool part) the clause is elliptical. So if you mean “Angelina and Jennifer are not the same person”, you would say “Angelina is different from Jennifer”. But if you mean that the way things are with Angelina is not the same as the way things were with Jennifer, you can say “Angelina is different than Jennifer”. (Source)

I love this about English — the subtle shades of meaning available to authors and speakers. I’m sure it’s true of all natural languages in varying degrees. I understand the lofty goals of linguistic prescriptivists (i.e., those who pass judgment on what uses, syntaxes, spellings, etc. are right and which are wrong) and authors of constructed languages (i.e., L. L. Zamenhof, the guy who came up with Esparanto (click here if you know of Esparanto and have a passing familiarity with the Eagles)). But I suspect that they lack appropriate reverence for the beauty of the tangled underbrush that they are so eager to clear.

I don’t think that I’m being elitist, really. I think you might could argue that I’m in favor of an aspect of English that makes it difficult for outsiders to learn and for native speakers to master, all because I have had the luxuries of time, money and access to education that allow me to appreciate it. But “different than” points up the problem with that argument. From my very brief reading this morning, it sounds like the prescriptivists had all but killed off “different than” as an acceptable use. I suspect that it did not end up in the American Heritage dictionary because it was revived by the literati, but because it persisted in everyday English. And it persisted in everyday English because people who don’t have MFAs found it useful.

Good news, everybody! I just opened the back door to let the dogs out, and I was not – NOT – met by a squishy wall of warm moist air that wraps itself around my legs and makes me wonder whether I’ve pissed myself.

I realized today that nearly all of the movies in my media software can be grouped into one of a very few buckets. (This gives me cause to wonder whether I may not be as amazingly interesting as I had previously thought.) Here are a few:

Zombie Movies - Because I like movies about the undead.

• 28 Days Later
• 28 Weeks Later
• Army of Darkness
• Dawn of the Dead
• Dead Snow
• The Gates Of Hell
• Jennifer's Body
• King of the Zombies
• Night of the Living Dead
• Planet Terror
• Shaun of the Dead
• Zombieland

Noir - My definition of film noir is a little on the loose side.

• Blade Runner
• Blood Simple
• Chinatown
• City Confidential
• Detour
• The Killing
• L.A. Confidential
• The Long Goodbye
• Miller's Crossing
• Pi
• Red Rock West
• The Third Man
• To Live and Die in L.A.

Pet Directors - These are movies made (more or less) by some of my favorite directors.

• 12 Monkeys
• 2001 A Space Odyssey
• A Serious Man
• Beetlejuice
• Blood Simple
• Coraline
• Death Proof
• Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
• Dune
• Fargo
• Frankenweenie
• Inglourious Basterds
• Kill Bill Vol. 1
• Kill Bill Vol. 2
• Lolita
• Machete
• Miller's Crossing
• Once Upon a Time in Mexico
• Paths of Glory
• Pee-wee's Big Adventure
• Planet Terror
• Shining
• Sleepy Hollow
• The Big Lebowski
• The Killing
• Vincent

Kung Fu - And similar. Some of these aren't really kung fu movies, but are listed here because they involve a lot of graceful ass kicking.

• Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
• Hero
• House of Flying Daggers
• Kagemusha
• Kung Fu Hustle
• The Matrix
• The Matrix Reloaded
• The Matrix Revolutions
• My Young Auntie
• The One-Armed Swordsman
• Red Cliff
• Red Cliff II

I had other categories, but I'm tied of this blog post now and it's hard to imagine that anyone else would not be.

I don’t understand it, but I love it. Three vignettes from a daddy-daughter day:

Me: Oh, hey, Amy Winehouse died this past week.

Sg: The “no no no” song lady? She died?

Me: That’s right. She had been sick for a long time, and recently died.

Sg: Oh no. [pauses] Did somebody write down her lines?

Me: Did somebody what? What do you mean?

Sg: Did somebody write down all of her notes before she died?

Me: I don’t know, but we have her recordings. So we can listen to the songs she already recorded.

Sg: We can still listen to her?

Me: Sure. [gives a three sentence overview of the pop music economy]

Sg: But I never got to go to her play, and now I can’t go to her play.

Me: You mean her concert?

Sg: Yes. I can never go to Amy Winehouse’s concert now.

Me: I probably wouldn’t let you go to an Amy Winehouse concern any time soon anyway.

Sg: Still, now I can never go.

Me: That’s true, and it is sad. But there are lots of concerts we can go to.

Sg: Yeah. At least it’s a good thing the people who sing “Under Pressure” are still alive.

Me: …Yeah, that is good. [changes the subject]

You made up a word this morning. You do that a lot, but I think this one may have legs:

flə-‘kä-kä - I’m not sure how you’d spell that. I just typed “flokaka”, but that looks horrible.

When I asked you what it meant, you said “horsefeathers”. It has stayed with me all day, but has morphed in my mind into whatever part of speech that one really bad “F” word is. As in “I understand you’re waiting for that parking place to open up, but do you have to do it right in the middle of the flakaka lane?”

Your favorite part of the temporary “mythical creatures” exhibit.

At the natural history museum, there is a book on a pedestal in front of a mural of the Pleistocene era that tells you about the various animals depicted on the wall. You began to briskly flip pages and said in a mocking “voice of authority” tone: “65 million years ago, all the birds were dinosaurs.” This is notable for a couple of reasons:

• When it comes to humor, you’ve so far been more a consumer than a producer. You’ve got friends (I’m thinking of Maddie in particular) who have been knocking them dead for a couple of years. But you have generally been satisfied with wacky. And I hope you don’t feel I’m being too harsh if I say that grownups generally are not amused by wacky for wacky’s sake. If I asked you to tell me a joke right now, I’d get something like “why is there a dinosaur with a suitcase on its head? That’s crazy!” Lately you’ve been adding irreverence to your repertoire, and I love it. I’m not sure who you were making fun of (probably me, now that I think about it), but it was some quality fun-making.
• Nice work on nailing the general vicinity of birds’ splitting from the dino family tree. We hadn’t even gotten to the dinosaurs yet, and I don’t know the last time we discussed the Cretaceous period.

A while back on this site, I got into a discussion with someone about the word “deplane”. The discussion really boiled down to an argument over whether the primary function of the dictionary should be prescriptive (i.e., telling people what words are included in a language) or descriptive (i.e., describing language as it is spoken). As I recall, my interlocutor, Erik, was arguing for a prescriptive approach — “deplane” is not a real word, it isn’t really needed (why not say “exit” or “disembark”?) and it should be avoided. I held a different view — people say “deplane” and people know what it means, so it’s a word and that’s fine.

I have been meaning to try to reopen that discussion, though that is not the purpose of this post. I ran across an article last night about the broader prescriptive/descriptive debate, and in thinking about it this morning I thought of a reason why our views on the topic might be so divergent. (After all, linguistics is both prescriptive and descriptive, so any argument takes place between two points on a sliding scale.) Erik is an American living in Spain and, if I’m not mistaken, has learned Spanish as an adult. If that’s right, he has probably depended on people and other resources to be prescriptive about how Spanish is spoken. Even though our discussion was about an English (non)word, Erik’s experiences probably gave him an appreciation for the real world value of prescription. (I, on the other hand, studied enough Latin and German in high school and college, respectively, to get my required language credits and not a semester more and I am not particularly concerned with the comfort of ESL students.) Erik made some comments in our discussion that should have cued me to this context.

I still think I’m right on the broader point — I do not see what harm would be avoided even if one could stop people from saying “deplane” — and I still find the question fascinating. But I should have established the parameters before launching into debate on the topic. It’s a lesson I’ve learned the hard way more than once, and you would think I would keep it in mind: don’t dive into a clash over the relative merits of different ways to do things without first asking “for what purpose?”. In this case, I should have started by filling in the blank in “is prescription better or worse than description for accomplishing __________”. It probably would have been helpful to agree (as I think most reasonable people would) that prescription is generally better for educating non-native, non-fluent speakers before moving on to the more interesting questions.

(The title of the post comes from the Simpsons. The Springfield town motto is “A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.” In one episode (which features the quietly creepy Donald Sutherland), one school teacher tells another that she never heard the word “embiggen” before moving to Springfield. The other teacher says “I don’t know why. It’s a perfectly cromulent word.”)